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WHAT CHRISTIANITY 
MEANS TO ME 

A SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



WHAT CHRISTIANITY 
MEANS TO ME 

A SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



BY 

LYMAN ABBOTT 

11 



Till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. 



I13eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

All rights reserved 






COPTEIQHT, 1921, 

Bt the macmillan company 



Set uip and ©le^tt-otjped. Publislidd March, 1921 



MAR 30 1^21 
g)CI,A611376 






ro 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

I "How This Book Came to Be Written . • i 
11/ 1 Give Unto Them the Keys of the Kingdom 14 

III >The Church's One Foundation . ... 32 

IV I Am Come to Preach Glad Tidings to the 

Poor • 52 

V 'I Am Come to Give Life ..•*•. 64 

VI^ /l Am Come to Fulfill the Law and the 
S Prophets , . . • 84 

VII ^I Have Manifested Thy Name . . • • 97 

VIII/^I Have Come to Seek and to Save That 

IWhich Was Lost . . ^ 1 19 

IX I Came to Give My Life a Ransom for 

Many * . , 146 

X ^' Thy Kingdom Come on Earth • . ^ . 171 

Epilogue , • * . . 188 

Appendix * * * • a . * • ■ h * 191 



PROLOGUE 

The Christianity of the Twentieth Century is 
not the same as the Christianity of Jesus Christ; 
and it ought not to be. For Christianity is a l ife , 
and after nineteen centuries of growth it can no 
more be the same that it was in the First Century 
than an oak is the same as an acorn, or America 
in 1920 is the same as America in 1787. Jesus 
told his disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven 
was like a seed planted, which from the least of 
seeds would grow to be a great tree. This is what 
has happened. The Roman Catholic Mass is quite 
different from the Last Supper as taken by Jesus 
and his friends in that upper chamber; the West- 
minster Confession of Faith is quite different from 
the Sermon on the Mount; the highly organized 
churches of the present day are quite different from ' 
the Church in the house as described in the Book of 
Acts. During these nineteen centuries philosophers 
have been trying to interpret Christian life and 

experience and so have developed a Christian 

vii 



viii PROLOGUE 

theology; reformers have been trying to apply the 
principles inculcated by Jesus Christ to the varying 
and often complex conditions of society and so have 
developed a Christian social ethics ; men and women 
have been trying to express their experiences in 
methods adapted to their various temperaments and 
so have developed Christian rituals; pagans coming 
into the Christian life have brought their paganism 
with them, so that while their paganism has been 
Christianized at the same time and by the same 
process Christianity has been paganized. 

To-day throughout Christendom we are submit- 
ting this modern Christianity to a sifting process. 
We are trying to find out what in it is Christian and 
what pagan, what natural growth and what artificial 
addition, what we shall accept and what reject. The 
Protestants are rejoiced to see this sifting process 
going on in the Roman Catholic communion, the 
Liberals welcome it in the conservative churches; 
personally I welcome it wherever it appears and 
whatever questions it asks. Unbelief is less dan- 
gerous than insmcere beliefs. But in this book I 
do not take part in this sifting process. Without 
attempting to determine what of modern Chris- 



PROLOGUE ix 



tianity is true and what false, I invite my reader 
to join me in an attempt to get back of all the 
product of centuries of life and thought, to inquire 
what was Christianity as it was taughtjby Jesus 
Christ in the First Century, to ascertain what is 
essential in his spirit and his teaching which makes 
Augustine and Luther, Calvin and Wesley, Lyman 
Beecher and W. E. Channing, in spite of their dif- 
ferences. Christian teachers, and the Roman 
Catholic Sisters of Charity and the Social Settle- 
ment workers Christian despite their differences in 
temperament and method. 

My critical studies have convinced me that we 
have in the New Testament a fair reflection of the 
teaching of Jesus Christ as it was understood by 
his immediate disciples in the First Century; that 
there is no inconsistency between his teaching and 
that of the Apostle Paul; that the Fourth Gospel 
was written by the Apostle John, or by one or more 
of his disciples recording reports received from 
him; that it truly reflects the mystical aspects, as 
Matthew reflects the ethical aspects of the Master's 
teaching; and that, if we would understand the 
Master, we must realize that he was both practical 



X PROLOGUE 

and mystical, Oriental and Occidental. But I do 
not accept the conclusions of those scholars who 
have attempted to distinguish in the Gospels be- 
tween the teachings of Jesus and those of his inter- 
preters. Such a discrimination cannot be accom- 
plished by grammatical and exegetical methods. 

I began the systematic study of the New Testa- 
ment when I entered the ministry in i860. Since 
that time I have been a student of one book, a 
follower of one Master. My aim in life as teacher, 
pastor, administrator, editor and author, has been 
to understand the principles which Jesus Christ 
inculcated and to possess something of the spirit 
which animated him, that I might apply both his: 
principles and his spirit to the solution of the various 
problems, individual and social, of our time. Other 
books I have studied, to other teachers I have lis- 
tened; but in the main either that I might better 
understand Christ's teaching or better understand 
the problems to which that teaching was to be ap- 
plied. Many problems which theologians have at- 
tempted to solve I am content to leave unsolved. 
Like the Hebrew; Psalmist I do not exercise myself 
in things too wonderful for me. After sixty years 



PROLOGUE xi 

of study I still say with Paul, -' I know only In frag- 
ments and I teach only in fragments." After more 
than sixty years of Christian experience, — - for I 
cannot remember the time when I did not wish to be 
a Christian, — I still say with him, " I count not my- 
self to have apprehended but I follow after that I 
may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended 
of Christ Jesus/^ 

This volume is an endeavor to state simply and 
clearly the results of these sixty years of Bible study, 
this more than sixty years of Christian experience. 
The grounds of my confidence in the truth of the 
statements made in this volume are the teachings 
of Jesus Christ and his apostles as reported in the 
New Testament, interpreted and confirmed by a 
study of life and by my own spiritual consciousness 
of Christ's gracious presence and Ufe-giving love. 

Lyman Abbott, 

The Knoll, 
Comwall-on-Hudson, N. Y^ 



WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS 
TO ME 

CHAPTER I 
HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 

On this my eighty-fifth birthday I look back over 
the intervening three-quarters of a century and see 
myself a boy of eight or ten, growing up in a 
Puritan household under Puritan training. 

This boy's mother is dead, his father is hundreds 
of miles away, his home is with a grandfather whom 
he reveres and an aunt whom he loves. His 
supreme ambition is to be like his mother, his 
father, his grandfather, his aunt. They are his 
ideals. 

He has read his Bible, has attended church, has 
heard sermons, though not listened to them, has 
been at Sunday School, has honestly tried to do 
right, to obey his conscience and the laws of God 



2 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

as they have been explained to him by the Bible 
and his religious teachers. He has heard the text, 
'' Thou, God, seest me," and has wished that God 
did not. He has been afraid to answer to God, 
has dreaded the time when he shall stand before 
God's judgment seat. To him God has been a kind 
of awful and omnipresent police justice, and he a 
scared culprit who knows he is liable to punishment, 
but does not clearly know why. To him, in short, 
religion has been little more than a succession of 
sinnings and repentings. 

As he has grown older, he has had explained to 
him from the pulpit, often, the conditions of salva- 
tion. The explanation, as he has understood it, is 
something like this: He has broken the law of 
God. It is necessary that he should be punished. 
God is first of all a just God and must punish those 
who offend his law. But Jesus Christ is merciful 
rather than just, perhaps rather more merciful than 
just. He has, therefore, come to the earth and 
suffered the penalty of sin in order that the sinner 
may be let off from that penalty. In order to be 
let off from that penalty, the sinner must believe 
that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he has 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 3 

come to earth, and that he has suffered the penalty. 
This boy, growing to youth and from youth to 
young manhood, cannot bring himself to believe 
anything merely because he is told that he must be- 
lieve it. He wishes to believe only the truth. His 
temperament is such that he cannot accept such a 
theological statement simply on authority. He be- 
gins, therefore, a course of theological study. He 
gets Pearson on the Creed and reads it through. 
Then he takes up the successive articles of the creed 
and reads various treatises elucidating them. 
Brought up in a Puritan household, he naturally 
turns to Puritan divines. He reads Calvin's ^* In- 
stitutes,'' Jonathan Edwards on the ''Will," 
Dwight's " Theology." But the more he studies, 
the more mysterious this theology becomes. It does 
not fit in with his ideas of righteousness that one 
person should be punished for another person's sins. 
It does not appeal to his affections, this portraiture 
of a God who can be satisfied only by inflicting pen- 
alty on those who have done wrong. It does not 
appeal to his reason, this religion which requires 
him to forgive his enemy until seventy Jimes seven, 
yet tells him that God will not freely forgive the 



4 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

least sin of the most unconscious sinner. His as- 
sociations are in the Church of Christ. The men 
and women whom he most reveres are members of 
that church. The work which the church is trjdng 
to do increasingly appeals to him. Finally, he goes 
to the orthodox pastor of an orthodox church and 
explains his difficulty and states his experience. 
His experience is very simple : " I would like to 
have a character like that of Christ and to do the 
kind of work that Christ did in the world and I am 
sorry that my character is not more Christlike and 
my work more worthy. But the system of theology, 
with its Three-Persons-in-One God, its vicarious 
atonement, its eternal punishment, its f oreordination 
and decrees, I cannot understand; and the more I 
study it, the less I understand it/' And the ortho- 
dox minister replies to him : " We none of us un- 
derstand it very well and we should be glad to have 
you join the church." And he does join the church. 
As he looks back upon it, he has reason to suspect 
that he was accepted, not on his very imperfect 
confession of faith, but on the fact that his father 
and his uncle were members of the church and he 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN s 

was believed to be a young man without bad habits. 

About this time he begins to attend Plymouth 
Church and to get from the preaching of Henry 
Ward Beecher a different conception of theology 
and also a different conception of religion. The 
change in his apprehension is gradual, so gradual 
that, as he looks back over a period of more than 
half a century, he finds himself unable to realize it 
with any vividness or to describe it with any ac- 
curacy. Even now, as he attempts to describe its 
result, he is quite conscious that his description is 
inadequate, if not inaccurate, and will be certainly 
misunderstood, but it is something like this: He 
^ begins to believe that Jesus Christ is not an am- 
bassador from God to Man, not an intermediary 
between God and Man, not a victim who has borne 
the penalty which God exacts of man, but God 
entering into a human life that he may enable men 
to understand him. 

Suppose that all your life you had dreaded an 
awful God, or in fear submitted to a fateful God, 
or hesitated between defying and cringing before 
a hated God, or yainly sought to understand a hid- 



6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

ing God, and suddenly the curtain were rent aside 
and you saw the luminous figure of the living Christ, 
and over his head were written the words, '' This 
is thy God, O man/^ Something like this was the 
experience which dawned on the mind of this youth 
growing into manhood. He had thought of God 
as infinite power. Here is a God revealed to him, 
not by an awful manifestation of supernatural 
power but by the endearing manifestation of an un- 
paralleled love. He had thought of God as infinite 
intelHgence. Here is a God, revealed in the life of 
a man who is limited in his wisdom as the men 
about him, knowing no more of geography or his- 
tory or science than those whose Hfe he shares. He 
had thought of God as impersonated justice, who 
could not bear to look upon any wrongdoing and 
to whom the peccadillo of a child and the crime of 
a Nero or a Caligula were all as one. He sees in- 
stead a God who takes the little children in his 
arms to bless them, turns to the weeping, fallen 
woman with the words, " Neither do I condemn 
thee; go, and sin no more " ; a God who reserves his 
indignation for the hypocrite who devours widows' 
houses and for a pretense makes long prayers. He 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 7 

had thought of God as a great king, sitting upon a 
great white throne, and he tried to send his prayers 
up thither by a kind of wireless telegraphy, though 
wireless telegraphy was not then known. But now, 
when he kneels to pray, he first reads something 
from the Gospels, then forms in his mind a picture 
of Jesus, sits down by the side of the man and 
talks with him and prayer becomes easy conversa- 
tion. He had thought of God as an omniscient 
judge who knew him as the detective police know 
and dog the footsteps of a criminal. Now, he reads 
the story of a God in man who has known sorrow, 
has wrestled with temptation, has understood by 
experience the trials that come through the voices 
of ambition, of pleasure and of affection. 

God is no longer to him a great unknown. This 
youth, growing to manhood, no longer goes to the 
great theologians for light. He goes to the simpler 
interpreters of life. He remembers his own fa- 
ther, who might easily have made for himself a great 
reputation in science or in philosophy, but who 
gave himself to writing books for children that 
children could understand. He reads those letters 
of the author of " Alice in Wonderland '' to the 



8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

little children, and sees how this great mathemati- 
cian shared the children's life, felt their enthusiasms, 
participated in their imaginations, was a child with 
the children. And he begins to say to himself, " My 
God has come to me as these authors went to the 
little children. He has come to me that he might 
write in his life on earth a language which I can 
understand. He is one who sees life as I see it, ex- 
periences life as I have experienced it, shares my life 
with me, that I may see life as he sees it, experience 
life as he experiences it, share his life with him. 
Now I can understand him, for he has entered into 
my life. We understand each other. We are 
friends. He is to me the Great Companion." 

This boy now grown to manhood, no longer goes 
up to the great white throne to find his God, no 
longer anticipates in the future life a day of judg- 
ment when he will stand face to face with God. 
His God who was here once is here still. The 
veiled, invisible figure that is always walking 
through life, always sitting at all men's side, was 
for one moment made so clear that human eyes could 
see him and human hands could handle him, then, 
hidden from human eyes, escaping from human 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 9 

touch, is the nearer to us because invisible, intan- 
gible. There is no home in which love is centered 
and cradled in which he does not sit as he sat in 
the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus whom 
v^ he loved, no home where sorrow and tears have 
j entered, in which he does not come saying, " There 
is no death. He that liveth and believeth in me 
can never die.'^ There is no man beating upon his 
breast and crying out, '' Oh, thou unknown God, 
have mercy upon me a sinner,'' to whom he does 
not say, '' Thou art more justified than the proud 
man who thought he was righteous.'' There is no 
true wedding to which he does not bring the cheer 
of merrymaking friendship. There are no children 
whom he does not seek to take into his arms and put 
his hands upon them and bless them. There is no 
sorrow which he does not share with sorrowing 
humanity. The bitterest sorrow of all, remorse, 
the sorrow for wrong done that can never be un- 
done, this he shares most of all. Henceforth, 
through all the subsequent years of this seeker's 
life, for him the glory of God shines in the face of 
Jesus Christ. He has no interest in theological 
debates concerning the metaphysical relation of 



10 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Jesus of Nazareth to the Eternal. He finds no 
satisfaction in scholastic definitions of a triune and! 
little known God, in the ecclesiastical characteriza- 
tions of Jesus as Light of Light, Very God of 
Very God, Begotten not Made, and the like. His 
interest is in the divine light which Jesus Christ 
has brought into the world. His satisfaction is in 
the experience of fellowship with the God revealed 
in Jesus Christ, — a God who is upon, the earth and 
whose life is ever a Christ life, — a life of love, 
service and sacrifice. 

Inspired by this faith in a God whose glory is 
reflected in the face of Jesus Christ, he is possessed 
with a growing desire to give this faith to others. 
It means so much to him. It so lightens burdens, 
strengthens purpose, inspires with courage, solves 
perplexities, simplifies life, bestows peace, that he 
longs to give to others the gift which has been given 
to him. He leaves his chosen profession of the 
law, not because he is dissatisfied with it, but 
because he is eager to devote all his engeries to the 
joyous task of giving to others the glad tidings 
which have made him glad. 

To that purpose he has now for sixty years given 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN ii 

himself in various forms of activity, but with 
unvarying purpose. As pastor, secretary, editor, 
author, he has had no other aim. As preacher he 
has known no other sermon. His first book was a 
Life of Jesus Christ; his second, a volume on certain 
New Testament aspects in Old Testament teachings; 
his third, a Commentary on the New Testament. 
When he has written on the Bible, it has been to 
interpret the prophets and apostles of the olden 
time as messengers of a God revealed in man. 
When he has written on theology, it has been to 
interpret life as a discipline of men being made 
God-like. When he has written on politics or 
sociology, it has been to throw some light on the path 
that leads to the kingdom of God. When he has 
written as editor of a weekly journal, it has been to 
interpret current history in its relation to this devel- 
opment of the human race and to apply to current 
problems, individual and social, the principles incul- 
cated by Jesus Christ and still more the spirit which 
Jesus Christ possessed. From first to last, he has 
been a student of one book, the New Testament. 
Other books he has studied, including the Old 
Testament, for the light they throw either on the 



t 



12 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

teaching of the New Testament or on the sorrowful 
conditions of human life for which Jesus Christ 
has brought a remedy. From first to last, he has 
been a disciple and a follower of one Master. A 
Congregationalist because he was born and brought 
up in the Congregational Church, he has been 
equally ready to work with prelate or layman. 
Catholic or Protestant, believer or agnostic, Jew 
or Gentile, whether he formally acknowledged 
allegiance to Jesus Christ or not, provided he was 
imbued with the spirit of the Christ and was 
endeavoring to inculcate the principles of the Christ. 
That he has always been correct in his own interpre- 
tations, he does not imagine. .But looking back 
over that sixty years, he can and does affirm, as in 
the presence of the Master, that his one controlling 
purpose has been to give to others that secret of a 
happy life which he has found in his faith that Jesus 
the Christ, is the Savior of all men, especially of 
them that believe. 

And now that he has passed four score years, he 
attempts to set down here, simply and clearly, what 
he believes is the message which Jesus Christ has 
brought to the world. This book has long lain in 



HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN 13 

his mind. Its failings will not be due to lack of 
meditation; they will be due to the fact that no 
one man can tell all that Christianity means. He 
can only tell what Christianity means to him. This 
book, therefore, will be a fragment, as every book 
on the teaching of Jesus Christ must be a frag- 
ment. '' We know in fragments and we prophesy 
in fragments," says the Apostle Paul. I am content 
to add my fragment to those contributed by abler 
predecessors and, as this volume sums up the 
teaching of a lifetime, it will repeat sometimes, 
doubtless in_ form as well as in substance, what the 
writer has before taught; and as the writer's under- 
standing of the Master has grown and, therefore, 
changed from year to year, this interpretation will 
be inconsistent probably in more than one passage 
with interpretations which he has before given to 
the world. Nor does he intend to make any apology 
for either the interpretation or the inconsistency, 
for his aim is not to exhibit either originality or 
consistency, but to interpret to others that message 
of life which more than half a century of study in 
and meditation upon the life and teachings of the 
Master have interpreted to him. 



CHAPTER II 

I GIVE UNTO THEM THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM ^ 

I WAS ordained to the Christian ministry in i860, 
my first pastorate was in Terre Haute, Indiana, 
and almost my first pastoral activity was the or- 
ganization of a Congregational Bible Class for 
the study of the Life of Christ. Its membership 
included men and women of every variety of 
religious opinions, some of them not in my congre- 
gation. One elderly gentleman was a Calvinist 
who always doubted whether he had been elected, 
another brought up under the religious instruction 
of Dr. Fumess in Philadelphia and Theodore 
Parker in Boston, believed with the latter that a 
*' perfect man '' was but the dream of silly school 
girls. There were two rules and only two for the 
government of the class : the first, that every mem- 
ber was absolutely free to express his opinion with- 
out hindrance ; the other, that while the freest inter- 

1 See Appendix I. 

14 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 15 

change of opinions was encouraged, debate was not 
allowed. We studied the Life together in a quite 
frank and, I believe, very honest endeavor to learn 
from the original narratives what we could of the 
character, mission and teachings of Jesus of Naz- 
areth. We all had our prejudices but we could not 
assume them to be true. Whatever belief any one 
of us entertained he must be able to make clear to 
himself in order to make it clear to his neighbor. 
These prejudices, freely presented but neither 
attacked nor defended and never treated otherwise 
than with respect, had a tendency to neutralize one 
another. In such an atmosphere I found necessity 
for much more severe study than I had ever known 
in college. My original conception that Jesus 
Christ was the founder of one of the four or five 
great world religions, that this religion had in its 
foundation a well defined theology, a church organ- 
ization and a form or forms of worship, and that 
the present variations in creed, church organization 
and forms of worship are either corruptions which 
have crept into the church or unessential and per- 
missible variations, was rudely shaken in that first 
year of joint study. Subsequent studies have not 



i6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

reestablished that conception. They have over- 
thrown it. 

I no longer regard Jesus Christ as the Founder of 
a system; I regard him as the Gi ver of li fe. I still 
think that the various Christian creeds, rituals and 
churches are instruments more or less honestly 
intended to promote in the community the spirit and 
teachings of Jesus Christ. But I do not think that 
any creed or combination of creeds can adequately 
define Christian thought, or that any forms of 
worship constitute an adequate expression of Chris- 
tian experience, or that any church or all churches 
united can be an adequate instrument of Christian 
activity. 

There lies before me as I write the creed of 
Plymouth Church (Brooklyn) adopted in 1848. It 
is no longer subscribed by its membe'rs, but in i860 
assent was still required, and it fairly represents 
the theological opinions of liberal orthodoxy at that 
time. It affirms belief in one true God, Sovereign, 
Infinite in Power, Wisdom and Goodness, in the 
Bible as an authoritative rule of faith and practice, 
in the Trinity, in the Fall of Adam and in the 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 17 

vicarious atonement. I had been commissioned as 
a Congregational minister, part of whose duties it 
was to teach a system of theology of which these 
articles were an essential part. But when I came 
to study the teachings of Jesus with my fellow 
students in this Congregational Bible Class, I found 
that he never mentioned vicarious atonement or the f ^ 
Fall of Adam or the Trinity, and while he often ^ 
quoted the Old Testament and always with a respect 
if not with a reverence which he never paid to the 
traditional teaching of the synagogue, he never 
apparently relied upon it as an authoritative rule of 
faith and practice. He said little or nothing about 
the Power or Sovereignty of God, but much about 
his Fatherly care and forgiving kindness; nothing 
about a Trinity, though much about his own spiritual 
oneness with his Father; he condemned in no un- 
certain terms the sins of his time but never traced 
them back to Adam; he said much about self-sacri- 
fice, but nothing about priestly sacrifice to atone for 
sin. He never offered sacrifice himself and never 
counseled his disciples to do so; and never required 
or referred to any sacrifice as a condition of the 



i8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

forgiveness which he freely offered in his Father's 
name to those who wished to abandon their sin and 
escape from their bondage to it.^ 

It was not, however, merely a Congregational 
polity and a Congregational creed which I failed to 
find in the teachings of Jesus; I found there no 
system of ecclesiasticism and no system of theology. 
Ecclesiasticism is defined by the Century Dictionary 
as *' devotion to the interests of the church and the 
extension of its influence in its external relations." 
I did not find in the life and teachings of Jesus 
Christ any devotion to the interests of the church 
or the extension of its influence in its external rela- 
tions. Theology is defined by the Century Dic- 
"^ tionary as '* the science concerned with ascertaining, 
classifying and systematizing all attainable truth 
concerning God and his relation to the universe.'' 
I did not find in the teachings of Jesus Christ any 
endeavor to classify or systematically define all 
attainable truth concerning God and his relations to 
the universe. He was neither a priest nor a rabbi, 

1 His direction to the leper in Mark i : 44 was to fulfill a 
sanitary regulation which required a leper to get a health cer- 
tificate from the priest before the ban was removed and he 
could again mingle with people. 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 19 

and it was brought against him as an accusation 
by his critics that he had never received a theological 
education. He did not choose the companions of 
his ministry from either priests or Rabbis ; he and his 
companions were lay preachers and neither he nor 
they performed priestly functions. He urged upon 
his disciples the privilege of prayer and he attended 
the synagogue services on the Sabbath day, but he 
never urged public worship as a duty on others, and 
he was as ready to preach in the private houses, in 
the fields, or from the prow of a fishing boat as in a 
house dedicated to the worship of God. Apparently 
all places were equally sacred to him. 

Nor did I find in Christ's teaching any provision 
of a new theology or a new ecclesiastical system to 
take the place of the old. Hie made no attack on 
the religious forms or institutions of his time 
though he evidently did not regard them of vital 
importance. Born a Jew, he remained a Jew to the 
day of his death, yet he commended a Roman cen- 
turion as possessing greater spiritual faith than any 
orthodox Israelite he had ever seen, and told his 
hearers that there were pagans who would go into 
the Kingdom of God and there were Israelites who 



20 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

would be cast out. His teaching was not theological 
J)ut vital He taught men, says one of his earliest 
disciples, how to live — soberly, righteously and 
godly, looking for the appearing of God. It has 
grown increasingly clear to me with the passing 
years that the most radical difference between the 
teaching of Jesus Christ and that of the churches 
is this : Jesus taught men how to live ; the churches 
have taught men what to think: Jesus tested men 
by their lives; the churches have tested them by 
their beHefs. 

The notion that Jesus organized a Christian 
church to take the place of the decaying Jewish 
church has very little evidence to support it. The 
word church occurs only twice in the Gospels, and 
the Greek word means assembly or mass-meeting. 
It would not be inapt to translate it '' town-meet- 
ing''.^ In Galilee, finding the time too short and 
the work too large for his own unaided ministry, 
Jesus selected twelve from among his followers and 
commissioned them to preach in the villages while 
he preached in the cities.^ Later, in the larger 

'^ See next chapter. 

2 Compare Matthew 9 : 35, ii : i, Luke g : 6. 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 21 

region beyond Jordan, he selected seventy itinerant 
ministers for a similar work.^ The commission 
was essentially the same in both cases. In neither 
case was there a hint in the appointment that it 
was permanent, or that the ministers were to appoint 
successors, or were to continue their work after the 
designated service had been rendered. In neither 
case were the directions which he gave of a kind 
that are applicable to our time, and no church of 
our time endeavors to conform to them. 

That he prescribed baptism and the Lord's Sup- 
per as permanent ordinances appears to me to rest 
on an equally slight foundation. Almost the sole 
evidence to support this opinion is the fact that 
they early became church ordinances, and the as- 
sumption that he must have foreseen and intended 
what in fact came to pass. 

The history of baptism, as it is related to the 
teaching and preaching of Jesus Christ is very 
simple. Among the ceremonial washings common 
among the Jews, probably the one to which they 
attached the greatest importance was the baptism 
of proselytes. When a pagan desired to become a 

1 Luke 10: 1-17. 



22 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Jew, he was immersed in water as a sign that he 
washed away his old sins and his old superstitions 
and emerged a new man. He was said to be born 
again. He ceased to be a pagan ; he became a Jew. 
When John the Baptizer began his ministry, it was 
with the declaration that the Jew needed cleansing 
no less than the pagan. You call yourselves, he 
said, children of Abraham. God could make out 
of the stones at your feet as good children as you 
are. To emphasize his teaching he called on them 
to be baptized and reenter the Church of God as 
though they had been pagans. So in our own time 
a civic reformer, denouncing the corruption of the 
people, might call on native Americans to take out 
naturalization papers and so renew their vows of 
loyalty to their country. Jesus at the very begin- 
ning of his ministry insisted that John should bap- 
tize him ; not — this is clear from their dialogue — 
because he needed to be purified, nor because he 
thought there was any purifying value in the water, 
but because he wished to identify himself in the 
public mind with the one moral reform of his time. 
In spirit and purpose he was one with John the 
Baptizer, though not, as he afterward explained, in 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 23 

doctrine and method. While he remained at the 
ford of the river Jordan, preaching with John the 
Baptizer the necessity for a national repentance, 
his disciples, who had themselves been the disciples 
of John and had been baptized by him, adopted his 
symbol, though Jesus himself did not, and they do 
not appear to have employed it after they left the 
Jordan — at least there is no record of their having 
done so. After his resurrection he gave them their 
commission. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of 
the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But this was not a 
direction to baptize with water and use a prescribed 
formula. In fact the disciples apparently did not 
ordinarily use this formula. They baptized in the 
name of Jesus. ^ It was a direction to bring all 
peoples into personal relations with the universal 
Father as he is interpreted by the life of his son 
and by fellowship with his spirit. He required not 
a sign but the life signified by that sign; and to 
the existing symbol, with which they were familiar, 
he gave a new significance. That this new signifi- 
cance imposes that symbol and a particular method 
1 Acts 7:38, 8: 15, 10:48, 19:5; Rom. 6:3; Gal. 3:27. 



24 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

of its use upon the church for all time does not seem 
to me a tenable proposition. The sacredness of 
baptism rests upon its antiquity as a rite and its 
fitness for its purpose. Certainly since it was 
never administered by Jesus Christ himself, it can 
hardly be called a part of the ecclesiasticism of 
Jesus Christ. 

Nor can the Lord's Supper be so regarded. 

The passage of the Red Sea by the Children of 
Israel was celebrated by a supper. This paschal 
supper was a family, not a church, festivity. The 
father administered it and originally himself killed 
the lamb for the table. No priest had any official 
part in it. Just before his death, Jesus Christ 
arranged to sit down with his especial friends at this 
paschal supper. He, who was not a priest, presided 
at the table as the father of the household. He took 
the occasion to give his friends some last words of 
counsel, of inspiration, and of affection. And he 
asked his disciples that thereafter, when they sat 
down to the paschal supper, they should make him, 
as it were, their guest; and that they should not 
merely recall the deliverance of Israel at the Red 
Sea, but should remember him — his life, his love, 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 25 

his sacrifice. Did his words mean anything more? 
Perhaps. Perhaps they meant a request that for all 
time his disciples should make him their guest ; that 
for all time they should break bread with him and 
renew their pledge of loyalty and love; that every 
household meal should be a sacred meal. But 
surely this request for love is despoiled of its 
highest meaning when it is transformed into a com- 
mand for a ceremonial observance. Surely, 
whether it be complied with in a meeting-house or 
a cathedral, kneeling before an altar or sitting in a 
pew, in a sacred church or in the more sacred home, 
administered by a priest or, as the Last Supper was 
administered, by a layman, it is not a church ordi- 
nance but a family festival, truly called a ^' Com- 
munion '' because it is a feast of sacred fellowship, 
truly called a ^' Eucharist '' because it is a thanks- 
giving of sacred love. It cannot be counted a part 
of the ecclesiasticism of Jesus Christ. 

The institutions of Christianity, however im- 
portant they may be, were not framed by Christ 
and imposed on his followers. They were gradu- 
ally developed by his followers after his death. 

The story of the life and teachings of Jesus 



26 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Christ carried out into the pagan world by his 
disciples appealed to universal instincts of humanity. 
That story inspired aspirations before unknown and 
showed that they could be realized ; it created a new 
ideal of life by portraying it as a realized ideal; it 
awoke slumbering desires and transformed them 
into a resolute purpose. It did more; it came to 
the poor, the slave, the outcast and the despairing 
as- Jesus had come to Lazarus and, like Lazarus, 
they came forth from their tombs, but still bound 
hand and foot with grave clothes. Christianity 
converted paganism, but paganism changed Chris- 
tianity. The new life took on the forms of the old. 
Statues of pagan gods were renamed for the Bible 
heroes and Christian saints; pagan temples were 
converted into Christian churches; pagan festival 
days were retained as Christian holy days; pagan 
ceremonies were preserved but rechristened and 
given a. new significance. The Christian Brother- 
hoods took on the form of organizations with which 
people were familiar. In Greek communities, 
where the democratic town meeting was not un- 
known, the churches were democratic or Congre- 
gational. In Jewish communities the converted 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 27 

synagogue became a Christian church, but adopted 
the form of the synagogue, which was Presbyterian. 
As soon — and it was very early — as two or more 
churches in a city or moderately sized district came 
to coexist side by side, cooperation was desired 
in the interest of both fellowship and efficiency, and 
the minister of one of these churches became either 
by natural preeminence in character or by the 
choice of the others, an overseer over all the 
churches, and so the bishopric grew up. As the 
Christian religion became the official religion of 
Rome, it adopted the Roman form of government; 
the bishop of Rome became the head of an imperial 
church and bishops and archbishops became its 
provincial governors. 

The teaching of the church inevitably felt the 
same influence. Christian thought could not affect 
pagan thought without being in turn affected. 
Paul warned his disciples against mistaking phil- 
osophy for religion, loyalty to opinion for loyalty 
to a Person, conversion of the intellect for the con- 
version of the will : — but his meaning was uttered 
in vain. In the Apostolic times the one condition 
of joining the Christian Brotherhood was loyalty to 



28 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Jesus and baptism as a symbol of enlistment in his 
cause. By the sixth century the imperial church 
had substituted for this simple expression of fidelity 
to a Person the Athanasian creed with its incompre- 
hensible definition oi the Trinity '' which except a 
man believe faithfully he cannot be saved." Chris- 
tianity had not wholly ceased to be ajife, but it had 
become a system, and acceptance of the system was 
accounted essential to salvation. More importance 
was attached to baptism than to dedication to 
Christ's service. More importance was attached to 
the proper celebration of the Lord's Supper than 
to that fellowship of all Christian disciples with 
each other and with their Master of which the 
Lord's Supper had been a symbol. More im- 
portance was attached to a correct understanding 
of the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice than to the 
practice of self-sacrifice. More importance was 
attached to belief in the Trinity than to a divine 
life of faith and hope and love, that is, to a life 
of vision, aspiration and service. The apostle 
James had said that pure religion and undefiled is 
" to visit the fatherless and widows in their afflic- 
tion and to keep himself unspotted from the 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 29 

world/' But there are even to-day many Protestant 
churches and many Protestant pastors who regard 
regular attendance on church services on Sunday 
and on prayer meetings during the week as better 
evidence of Christian piety than either keeping 
oneself free from the spirit of worldliness or visiting 
the fatherless and widows in their affliction. The 
Christian church has provided itself with theological 
meat and ecclesiastical raiment and has too often 
regarded the raiment as more than the body and 
the meat as more than the life. Paul defined the 
church as the body of Christ through which Christ 
has to carry to its completion his divine mission. 
The church has defined itself as a *^ congregation of 
faithful men in which the Word of God is preached 
and the Sacraments be duly administered/' and it 
has now proposed to attempt a union of all the 
churches of Christ on four foundations — the 
Bible; two historic creeds; the two Sacraments, 
Baptism and the Lord's Supper; and the Episcopate. 
The notion that this would open the door to all 
believers can hardly be entertained by any thought- 
ful Christian. There were Old Testament saints 
before the Old Testament and New Testament 



30 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

saints before the New Testament; the glorious 
company of the apostles and the noble army of the 
martyrs existed for many years before any creed 
was formulated; the church has produced no more 
devoted followers of Jesus Christ than such saintly 
Quakers as John Woolman and John G. Whittier; 
and the Episcopate has furnished no greater 
preachers of the Gospel than those of the Puritan, 
the Moravian and the Methodist churches. 

Jesus gave to his disciples no creed; but he in- 
spires them with an ambition to study the invisible 
world to which they belong and of which they are a 
part and their beliefs respecting this world they have 
expressed in creeds. He prescribed for them no 
ritual; but he inspires in them the experiences of 
penitence, reverence, gratitude, and consecration, 
and these experiences they have expressed in 
rituals. He organized no church; but he gave 
them work to do which they could do only by 
united effort, and the organizations which they 
have created for that purpose are the church. 

Are we then to consider the church as a human 

or a divine institution? I reply, divine in its mis- 

-<f' sion, divine in the spirit of life with which its 



THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM 31 

master endows it; but human in its forms of belief, 
of worship, and of organization. This two-fold 
character of the church has given to it a strangely 
contradictory character and career, and to that 
aspect of its character and career and the causes 
which have produced it I next direct the attention 
of the reader. 



CHAPTER III 

THE church's one FOUNDATION 

Qnly twice in the four gospels does the word 
church occur, and in only one of those instances do 
the words of Jesus throw any light on what the 
nature of that church should be. But before turn- 
ing to these passages it is necessary to guard against 
a common error in reading the New Testament. 
We naturally give to the words there the meaning 
which they now bear; but this is often quite dif- 
ferent from the meaning which they originally 
bore. Thus the word church calls up to our mind 
a picture either of the Protestant Church with its 
pulpits and its preachers or of the Catholic Church 
with its altars and its priests. But to suggest an 
idea analogous to either picture Jesus would have 
used the word synagogue or the word temple. The 
word ecclesia, rendered in our English version 
•' Church/' was in earlier versions rendered Con- 
gregation, and when used in the Greek version of the 

32 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 33 

Old Testament it is still rendered Congregation. 
In the Old Testament, as in classical Greek, it signi- 
fied either a mass meeting of the people or a popular 
assembly representing them, somewhat resembling 
the American House of Representatives or the 
English House of Commons. Bearing this fact in 
mind, we may now turn to the passage in Christ's 
Teaching in which he indicates the foundation of 
his Church or Congregation. 

Jesus had been preaching for about a year, and 
the twelve disciples had been accompanying him, 
listening to his preaching, doing a little preaching 
themselves, and gradually learning the truth which 
he had come to proclaim. He had taken them 
apart by themselves, partly for rest, partly for per- 
sonal religious instruction, — the first of those 
" Retreats '' which have been not any too fre- 
quently held by his followers since. He pursued 
the Socratic method. He asked them, '' Who do 
men say that I am ? '' '' Some that thou art John 
the Baptizer; some Elijah; others Jeremiah or one 
of the prophets.'' ^* But who do ye say that I 
am ? " To this question one of the disciples 
answered, *' Thou art the Messiah, the son of 



34 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

the living God." This answer Jesus accepted. 
'' Blessed/' he said, " art thou, Simon, son of 
Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it 
unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven. And 
I say also unto thee that thou art a rock, and upon 
this rock I will build my Israel,^ and the gates of 
Death shall not prevail against it.'' 

To this somewhat enigmatic utterance three dif- 
ferent interpretations have been given. Catholics 
have said that Christ founded his church upon 
Peter, or at least upon the Apostles, and that to 
them he gave supreme authority and conferred upon 
them the right to transmit their authority to others ; 
and they define the Church of Christ as a body of 
disciples whose leaders have received this apostolic 
ordination transmitted from generation to genera- 
tion. The difficulty about this interpretation is that 
Christ says nothing here or elsewhere about any 
successors to Peter or the Apostles, and that there 
is no indication in the New Testament that they 

1 " If we may venture for a moment to substitute the phrase, 
Israel, and read the words as '' on this rock I will build my 
Israel '* we gain an impression which supplies at least an ap- 
proximation to the probable sense." — F. J. A. Hort, D.D., 
*' The Christian Ecclesia." 



THE CHURCHES ONE FOUNDATION 35 

ever exercised the authority claimed by the modern 
priesthood. 

Protestants have interpreted Christ as meaning 
that Peter's confession of faith in Jesus as the 
Messiah and the son of God is the foundation of 
the Christian Church, and that any church which 
accepts this doctrine is sound and any church which 
repudiates it is unsound. The foundation then is 
not a person but a doctrine. The difficulty about 
this interpretation is that it does not interpret. It 
rubs off the slate that which Christ had put upon 
it and puts something else in its place. 

The third interpretation of this passage is that 
the foundation of Christ's church is not Peter's 
doctrine of Christ, nor Peter and the twelve as 
officers in an organization not yet formed, but Peter 
as a type of humanity transformed by the inspira- 
tion which he had received from a year of intimate 
companionship with Jesus. 

Simon, the son of Jonah, \(^as of all the apostles 
the one who had the least stability of character. He 
was not a rock; he was a wave of the sea. It was 
he who said, ^* Lord, bid me come out to thee upon 
the water,'' but who, making the venture and begin- 



36 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

ning to sink, cried, '' Lord, save me.'' It was he 
who said, " I will never deny thee ; I am ready to 
go with thee to prison and to death '' ; and then 
rushed into the Court of Caiaphas wuth audacity, 
only to deny his Master with oaths at the first 
temptation. It was he who was the first to preach 
the Glad Tidings to the Gentiles and yet, when the 
hierarchy came from Jerusalem, was frightened 
and refused even to eat with the Gentiles. To this 
vacillating man Jesus says, *' I will make a rock 
of you, even of you.'' If he could make a rock of 
Simon — and Simon's subsequent life shows that 
Jesus did so — he could make a rock of any one. 

.What Christ says then is, not I will build my 
church on you and your successors, nor, on what 
you have said, but, on you as a man transformed 
by the power of an indwelling Christ; on you as a 
type of a long line of humanity changed by com- 
panionship with me through the coming ages. 

This is the interpretation of Christ's saying 
afforded by its setting. This is also Peter's own 
interpretation. Writing years after to his contem- 
poraries, he says. 

You have had a taste of the kindness of the Lord: 
come to him then — come to that living Stone which men 



THE CHURCHES ONE FOUNDATION 37 

have rejected and God holds choice and precious, come 
and^ like living stones yourselves, be built into a spiritual 
house, to form a consecrated priesthood for the offering 
of those spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God 
through Jesus Christ.^ 

This is a very mixed metaphor, but these apostles 
were so full of the new life that in giving expres- 
sion to it they paid little attention to the rules of 
rhetoric. In Peter's thought the Church is both a 
living church and a stable church, a progressive 
church and a rocklike church. So he said, It is 
built upon living stones and out of living stones; 
a church of living spirits built upon a living 
Christ. 

And as this is the natural interpretation of the 
text and the interpretation of Peter himself so it 
is the interpretation given to it by history. The 
great leaders of the church, almost without excep- 
tion, have been men transformed by their spiritual 
experience of fellowship with a companionable 
God: — John, a son of Thunder, wishing to call 
down fire from Heaven on the Samaritan village, 
and a self-seeker, going in the very last hours of 
Jesus' life to ask of him the first office in his 
1 James Moffat : " Translation of New Testament.'' 



38 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

kingdom, but transformed into the beloved disciple 
and the preacher preeminent for his message of 
peace and love; Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, 
transformed into the eloquent herald of the glory 
of the liberty of the children of God; Augustine, 
transformed from a roue into a saintly theologian; 
Luther, called from the monastery to become the 
founder of Protestantism; Wesley, the High 
Churchman, made, in spite of himself, the founder 
of a great free church; John B. Gough, rescued 
from a drunkard's fate to become the apostle of 
temperance; Henry Ward Beecher, bred in the 
school of an iron-clad Puritanism to become a 
leader of the Puritan churches from their bondage 
unto law into the liberty wherewith Christ makes 
free. There is scarcely in all the history of the 
church a captain of its industries or a framer of 
its thought or an inspirer of its life who has not 
known the transforming power that was shown in 
Peter, who has not been changed, manifestly, and 
before the eyes of all mankind, changed that he 
might lead others into a larger and more Christ- 
like life. 

This interpretation of a passage confessedly 



THE CHURCHES ONE FOUNDATION 39 

enigmatical is illustrated and further confirmed by 
one of Christ's parables. 

As he approached that Valley of Death which each 
one of us must at last pass through alone, he had 
a great desire for one hour of quiet companionship 
with his friends. From one of his secret followers 
in Jerusalem he borrowed an upper chamber that 
he and his disciples might, as a family, take their 
last meal together undisturbed. He made one 
final effort to recover Judas Iscariot from his crime, 
but in vain, and unable longer to endure the traitor's 
presence, bade him go and fulfill his design. Then 
with characteristic self-devotion he set himself to 
prepare his disciples for the tragedy of the morrow. 
He told them that he was about to die, and used 
his unfailing courage to impart courage to them. 
You will leave me, he said, to face this hour alone; 
yet I shall not be alone for the Father will be with 
me. I shall seem to leave you alone ; yet you will 
not be alone, for the Father will give you the 
strength-giving spirit he has given to me and that 
spirit will abide with you forever. You will not 
see him but you will know him because he will be 
in you as he has been in me. You will think me 



40 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

dead; but I shall not be dead. I will come to you 
and you will share my imperishable life with me. 
And my Father will come and we will dwell with 
you and bring peace to you. And then he gives in 
a simple and to them familiar figure his interpre- 
tation of the Israel of the future, borrowing the 
figure from the Hebrew Psalmists, one of whom 
had, in the exile, sung of the vine which Jehovah 
had planted. 

Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt: 
Thou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst it. 

Thou preparedst room before it. 
And it took deep root, and filled the land. 

The mountains were covered with the shadow of it, 
And the boughs thereof were like cedars of God. 

It sent out its branches unto the sea. 
And its shoots unto the River. 

Why hast thou broken down its walls, 
So that all they that pass by the way do pluck it? 

The boar out of the wood doth ravage it, 
And the wild beasts of the field feed on it. 

Turn again, we beseech thee, O God of hosts : 
Look down from heaven and behold, and visit this vine. 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 41 

To this cry of the seemingly deserted Israel, 
Isaiah's use of the same figure furnishes a reply: 

Let me sing for my well beloved a song of my beloved 
touching his vineyard. My well beloved had a vineyard 
in a very fruitful hill: And he digged it, and gathered 
out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest 
vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also hewed 
out a winepress therein: and he looked that it should 
bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. 
And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, 
judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What 
could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have 
not done in it ? Wherefore, when I looked that it should 
bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? And 
now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard : I will 
take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; 
I will break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden 
down: and I will lay it waste; it shall not be pruned nor 
hoed; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will 
also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 
For the vineyard of Jehovah of hosts is the house of 
Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he 
looked for justice, but, behold, oppression; for righteous- 
ness, but, behold, a cry. 

In the days preceding the Last Supper Jesus had 
recalled to the multitudes in the temple this ancient 
figure and had compelled from the people their 
condemnation of the rulers of Israel : '' The Lord 



42 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

of the Vineyard/' they had said, "will destroy 
those wicked men and will let out his vineyard 
unto other husbandmen who will render him the 
fruits in their season.'' And Jesus had com- 
mended their verdict : " The Kingdom of God," 
he said, '' shall be taken from you and given to a 
nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." Now, 
speaking to his disciples to revive their hopes and 
inspire their courage, he recalled to their minds 
this familiar parable of the vineyard, and gave to 
it a prophetic interpretation : 

I am the true vine. My Father is the husbandman. 
Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, He taketh 
away. And every branch that beareth fruit, he cleanseth 
it that it may bring forth more fruit. Already ye are 
clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. 
Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear 
fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye 
except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches. 
He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth 
forth much fruit. Because apart from me ye can do 
nothing. In case any one shall not have abided in me he 
has been cast out like the branch that is withered, and 
they gather them together and they are burned. If ye 
abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what 
ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Therein is my 
Father glorified; so that ye shall bear much fruit and 
shall become my disciples. 



1 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 43 

This IS the fullest description which Jesus has 
left to the world of his ideal for that Brotherhood 
to which he has committed the cofnpletion of his 
commission. The members have organized them- 
selves into different worshipping congregations 
separated by the variety of their theological opin- 
ions, expressed in creeds, and the variety of their 
tastes and temperaments, expressed in rituals. 
These Christian organizations are sometimes treated 
in religious writing as though they were one and are 
called the Church, or The Holy Catholic Church; 
but the Christian Brotherhood out of which they 
have all grown is more than the Church or all the 
Churches combined. It is founded not on agree- 
ment in opinion, that is on a creed, not on agree- 
ment in forms of worship, that is on a ritual, not 
on agreement in the form of organization, that is 
neither on an hereditary priesthood nor on a demo- 
cratic congregation, nor even on love for a sacred 
but long since buried Messiah ; but on love and loy- 
alty to a living Messiah, forever incarnate in the 
hearts and lives of his disciples, in a more intimate 
companionship and with a far wider and mightier 
influence than when he trod the earth with the few 



44 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

score of faithful friends whom he gathered about 
him.^ 

This prophetic parable giving Christ's interpre- 
tation of what the Christian Brotherhood should be, 
interprets and is interpreted by the history of the 
Christianity. The little seed has become a great 
tree. The little band of twelve has grown to such 
proportion that it is counted by millions. The 
Brotherhood that had no purse nor scrip, nor even 
so much as two changes of raiment apiece when 
they went forth on their travels, is now endowed 
with a wonderful equipment. fThere are no edifices 
in the world more splendid than some of the edifices 
which this Brotherhood has constructed. There are 
no schools of learning better than those which this 
Brotherhood has endowed. It has spread over the 
globe, so that to-day there is scarcely any language 
in which the praise of their Leader is not sung; 
scarcely any community in which his word is not 
proclaimed; scarcely any spot where men do not 

^ For the sake of greater clearness I will in this chapter use 
the word church or churches to indicate the visible worship- 
ping congregations with their creeds and rituals, and the word 
Brotherhood to indicate the spiritual and invisible fellowship 
out of which all the churches have grown. 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 45 

gather to honor his name, and to strengthen them- 
selves the better to do his service. The influence 
from this band overruns its boundaries. Belief 
in the Leader, belief in a good God who rules the 
world, is no longer confined to the professed suc- 
cessors of these twelve. It is difficult to tell who 
are within the Brotherhood and who are without 
it, because the faith of the Christian church has 
become the faith of the Christian community, and 
the principles of the Christian church are, in some 
measure at least, accepted by those who do not 
profess to belong to it. 

It is true that the prosperity and progress of 
the church has been its peril. While it has 
been pushing its influence out into the world, the 
world has been pushing its influence into the 
church. Deeds of avarice and cruelty have been 
strangely interwoven in the fabric of its his- 
tory with deeds of unselfish devotion and self- 
sacrificing love. It has been both narrow-minded 
and large-hearted; both divided into petty sects 
quarreling over forms of words and united in world- 
wide service by love for its Master. Whenever 
it has lost that love; whenever it has substituted 



46 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

an admiration of beauty for a reverence of good- 
ness, emotional enjoyment for self-denying service, 
regulation of conduct for inspiration of the spirit, 
belief in a creed for faith in a Person, whatever its 
v^ealth, its political power, its prestige, whatever 
the beauty of its services, the regularity of its order, 
or the soundness of its theology, it has ceased to 
be a living church, and has had pronounced against 
it the condemnation uttered nineteen centuries ago 
against its prototype : *^ Thou sayest, I am rich, 
and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; 
and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miser- 
able, and poor, and blind, and naked/' 

Nevertheless, no organization has been so en- 
during, so world-wide in its influence, so beneficent 
in its service, so deathless in its vitality as the 
Christian church. And wherever it has gone it 
has sown the seeds out of which have grown hos- 
pitals for the sick, asylums for the poor, schools 
for the ignorant, liberty supplanting despotism, a 
reverence of love supplanting the reverence of fear, 
and, growing clearer with the passing of time, 
divine ideals of courage, chivalry, charity and 
brotherhood unknown before. It has been attacked 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 47 

by ruthless persecution from without and by feuds 
and factions not less ruthless from within. Again 
and again its usefulness has seemed to come to an 
end, and it has seemed to die a death from which 
there could be no resurrection; again and again it 
has been entombed, the rock door of its tomb has 
been sealed and its enemies have declared its power 
ended; and again and again it has risen from the 
dead, cast off its grave clothes and entered upon 
a new life. 

In the first century Nero thought that he had 
killed the infant child, and three centuries later 
the successor of Nero proclaimed Rome a Chris- 
tian empire. In the Middle Ages the Christian 
Church had adopted not only the outer form but 
the persecuting spirit of pagan Rome, and the splen- 
did cathedrals became its tomb and the jeweled 
robes of its priests became its grave clothes; yet 
all the while its deathless life inspired the Preach- 
ing Friars laying in England the foundations of 
England's future liberty, and the self denying 
sisters of mercy and charity precursors of the Red 
Cross of the then distant future. In the eighteenth 
century the Protestant Church seemed dead in 



48 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

England. The Cross was on the spires of the 
cathedral but not in the lives of the clergy; the 
preaching was an ethic as uninspiring as that of 
Confucius; the religion of Dean Swift was no more 
Christian than the infidelity of Bolingbroke; the 
most famous moral teacher of his time, Archdeacon 
Paley, defined virtue as '' doing good to mankind 
in obedience to the will of God and for the sake 
of everlasting happiness/' And yet out of this 
decadent church issued the enthusiasm of Wesley- 
anism in England and of Moravianism on the 
Continent. The nineteenth century saw dogmatism 
within the church and agnosticism without uncon- 
sciously joining their forces to destroy the church 
which was the only confessed defender of the truth 
and of the vitality of spiritual experience, and the 
century was called by friend and foe alike the " age 
of skepticism.'' And yet it is in this age of skep- 
ticism that the Christian church has given birth 
to the Young Men's Christian Association, the 
Young Women's Christian Association, the Salva- 
tion Army and the Red Cross, and their work has 
furnished the most luminous illustration the world 
has ever seen of the spirit of him who laid down 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 49 

his life for us that we might lay down our lives 
for the brethren. 

Jesus told his disciples that, "Where two or 
three are gathered together in my name there am I 
in the midst of them." Whenever two or three 
are gathered together united by their love and loy- 
alty to Jesus Christ as their Master and by their 
common purpose to carry on the work which he has 
left his followers to do, he is their comrade, and 
their organization is a part of his great Congrega- 
tion, a branch of the vine of which he is the life. 
The church, as he defined it, is much more than 
a body of Christian disciples possessing the same or 
similar beliefs, rituals, and form of organization, 
as the Roman Catholic, the Episcopal, the Presby- 
terian or the Congregational church; it is some- 
thing more than a visible and organic body of 
believers united by their acceptance of the creeds 
and some of the forms of worship of primitive 
times. The church, as Christ defined it, is the entire 
body of all those who are Christ's comrades in the 
work which he is carrying on in the world, united 
by their fellowship with one another and their faith 
in him. 



so WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Christianity is more than the institutions of 
Christianity. An institution is but a corpse if it 
does not embody a Hving spirit; form without 
spirit is always Hfeless; language is but idle words 
if it is not a vehicle for thought or feeling; the 
kiss may be a symbol of treason as well as of 
loyalty; the palace without love is a hovel, the hut 
which enshrines love is a home. But it is also 
true that spirit without body is almost as useless. 
Love in the heart inspires no one if it is not ex- 
pressed; unexpressed thoughts are of little service 
to him who possesses them and of no service to 
others. The Declaration of Independence would 
have been of no value if there had not been men 
willing to fight for it and die for it. Christianity 
is the spirit of Christ; the Christian Church is its 
imperfect embodiment. The institutions of religion 
are not religion; but religion would be almost 
wholly ineffective if it were not for its institutions. 

The work of the Christian Brotherhood is not 
ended and will not be ended so long as there is 
wickedness to be fought and human need to be 
helped. And never before was this Brotherhood 
more Christian in its essential spirit than it is to- 



THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 51 

day. Are there hungr}^ men? By this Brother- 
hood charity ministers to them? Are there sick? 
By this Brotherhood hospitals are built. Are there 
insane? This Brotherhood has taught men that in- 
sanity is not a crime. Are there criminals? This 
Brotherhood has taught that crime is a disease 
and the criminal is to be cured while he is pun- 
ished. In many a distant village or remote prairie 
at home, in crowded cities and in scattered popula- 
tions in foreign lands, men inspired by this hope, 
animated by this purpose, and following their 
Leader, are attempting to bring about the Kingdom 
of God upon the earth, giving themselves to an 
unrewarded ministry, and accepting the opportu- 
nity for service as itself the best of all rewards. 

What is the condition of belonging to this age- 
long and world-wide Brotherhood united solely by 
that love which is the bond of perfectness, Christ 
has made clear: '* Ye are my friends,'' he said, '' if 
ye do what I have commanded you/' Obedience to 
Christ's commands is the only condition which Christ 
has prescribed for membership in the Christian 
Brotherhood. What are his commands I ask my 
reader to consider in the chapters which follow. 



CHAPTER IV 

I AM COME TO PREACH GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 

Jesus in a single sentence has defined the mission 
of his followers : *' As the Father hath sent me, 
even so send I you/' He calls on his followers to 
carry on in successive generations, with his com- 
panionship and under his personal but invisible 
leadership, the work he was commissioned by his 
Father to do. What that work is he at different 
times and in different language has explicitly stated. 

The earliest of these statements is contained in 
his first reported sermon preached in the synagogue 
at Nazareth, in which he declared that he had come 
to fulfill the prophecies in the Old Testament of a 
kingdom of God on the earth, and that a distin- 
guished feature of that kingdom would be a new 
spirit of philanthropy. 

He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up: 
and as his oustom was, he went into the synagogue on the 

52 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 53 

Sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was 
delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And 
when he had opened the book, he found the place where 
it was written, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because 
he hath anointed me to preach glad-tidings to the poor ; he 
hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliver- 
ance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, 
to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the 
acceptable year of the Lord. . . . And he began to say 
unto them. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. 

Both the teaching and the practice of Jesus 
interpret this definition of his mission. His religion 
was a religion of humanity. He came to give a 
new creative impulse to benevolence and so a new 
meaning to human life. He put the heretical but 
humane Samaritan above the callous priest and 
Levite. He pictured life as an estate left by an 
absentee landlord in the care of a steward who 
would be tested by his treatment of the tenants. 
The nations accounted those great who wrung 
service from their inferiors; Christ accounted those 
great who rendered service to others. He esteemed 
no acts of genuine good-will insignificant. Two 
farthings in a contribution box or a cup of cold 
water to a thirsty pilgrim, if the gift of a generous 
spirit, he accounted an act of religion. To the men 



54 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

and women whom society, then as now, regarded 
as outcast sinners he brought promise of pardon 
and hope of a new life. But the man who devoted 
himself to accumulating and investing wealth he 
called a fool ; and he declared that hell would be the 
doom of the rich man who feasted sumptuously 
every day and left the beggar at his door uncared 
for, and of the Pharisee who devoured widows' 
houses and for a pretense made long prayers. In 
the only description of the last judgment which he 
ever gave, he declared that the Judge would measure 
men, not by their creeds, their church attendance, 
or their scrupulous observance of prescribed rituals 
and ordinances, but by their treatment of their 
fellow-men. The fact that they had never known 
him and were not conscious that they had rendered 
him any service would not condemn them. The 
fact that they had known him and confessed him as 
their Lord would not save them from condemna- 
tion. 

His life illustrated his teachings. He gave him- 
self with utter abandon to the service of others. 
Were they hungry, he fed them; sick, he healed 
them; crazy, he restored to them their recovered 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 55 

minds; ignorant, he taught them; in despair, he 
brought them hope; isolated from their fellow men 
by their pride, he pierced the walls of their prison 
house with sharp invective. No service was so 
lowly that he was unwilling to render it. Once 
his disciples who had been out all night fishing and 
were disheartened by their failure, when they came 
on shore found that he had cooked their breakfast 
for them. Once they had walked the dusty streets 
of Jerusalem with sandaled but unstockinged feet, 
and had hotly contested their respective rights to 
places of preeminence at the supper table. He 
waited till they had settled this important problem, 
then he girded himself with a towel as their 
servant and washed their feet himself. Finally, he 
freely offered up his life for enemies who hated 
him and for companions of whom one betrayed 
him, one denied him, and the rest, wuth one excep- 
tion, abandoned him. 

Nor was it merely the unhappy condition of the 
common people which moved his sympathy. At 
the very outset of his ministry he perceived clearly 
that the secret of the highest happiness and of the 
most poignant sorrow is in the spirit of man; in 



S6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

his character, not in his condition ; in what he is, not 
in where he is. He saw clearly that he could not 
fulfill his mission by merely feeding the hungry. 
Even if he turned the stones into bread the relief 
would be but slight and temporary. Heart hunger 
is more difficult to bear than bodily hunger. The 
blessed are not the rich but the lowly in spirit; not 
the sorrowless but those who are strengthened by 
their sorrows; not the grasping who acquire much, 
but the unselfish who inherit from their Heavenly 
Father what he chooses to bestow upon them. Alas 
for you rich! he cries, for you have received your 
consolation. Alas for you that are full! for you 
shall hunger. Alas for you laughing ones ! for you 
shall mourn. Alas for you of whom all men shall 
speak well! for so did their fathers of the false 
prophets. These four types of men whom we are': 
apt to envy, — -the rich, the full, the merry ax\d the 
popular — Christ pities. The rich, not because he 
is rich, but because he has gotten that for which he 
has been striving; the satisfied because he has no 
aspirations; the laughing ones because- life is serious 
and they never take life serfously; the man whom 
all men praise because all men never praise the man 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 57 

who with courage and real power is making^th 
world better than it has been. 

Jesus looked upon the crowds of ignorant men 
and women with compassion; not chiefly because 
they were poor, oppressed or hungry, but because 
they were a prey to demagogues, ill led and unpro- 
tected, like sheep without a shepherd. Neither their 
ignorance, their weakness nor their sins alienated 
him. Sin he counted a disease ; an insane conscience 
was to him like an insane mind. The Son of Man 
he said has come to seek and to save the lost — to 
seek not merely to save those that sought him, to 
call to repentance, not merely to answer the repen- 
tant when they called. And in these sayings as we 
shall see more fully later, he was interpreting the 
spirit of his Father. 

Animated by this spirit, Jesus not only preached 
in the open fields and in private houses wherever 
he could find an audience, but he visited in the 
homes of the despised tax gatherers and the out- 
cast sinners and sat at the table with them. The» 
Pharisees called him the friend of publicans and sin- 
ners, in which saying they unwittingly told the truth 
and a glutton and a wine bibber in which they con- 



;i 



S8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

sciously lied. And yet, did they lie? Or were 
they simply unable to conceive why any one should 
attend a feast of publicans and sinners unless he was 
attracted by the chance to eat and drink without re- 
straint? Even in his indignation against pride and 
false pretense Jesus was pitiful By his public in- 
vective against the men who devoured widows' 
houses and for a pretense made long prayers, he 
endeavored to pierce the fortress which their pride 
had erected and he ended his invective with a cry of 
lamentation : '' How can ye escape the damnation 
of hell? ^^ 

No one will claim that benevolence was bom in 
the first century. Pity for the suffering, mercy for 
the wrong-doer existed in the world before Christ. 
But in his birth they were reborn. From being an 
incident, the service of the needy gradually became, 
wherever the influence of Jesus Christ went, one 
of the great objects of life. Mr. Lecky in his 
" History of European Morals " has eloquently con- 
trasted pagan and Christian philanthropy, from 
which volume I quote the following sentences : 

The greatest things are often those which are most 
imperfectly realized; and surely no achievements of the 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 59 

Christian Church are more truly great than those which 
it has effected in the sphere of charity. For the first 
time in the history of mankind, it has inspired many 
thousands of men and women, at the sacrifice of all 
worldly interests, and often under circumstances of ex- 
treme discomfort or danger, to devote their entire lives 
to the single object of assuaging the sufferings of human- 
ity. It has covered the globe with countless institutions 
of mercy, absolutely unknown to the whole pagan world. 
It has indissolubly united, in the minds of men the idea 
of supreme goodness with that of active and constant 
benevolence. It has placed in every parish a religious 
minister who, whatever may be his other functions, has at 
least been officially charged with the superintendence of an 
organization of charity, and who finds in this ofiice one of 
the most important as well as one of the most legitimate 
sources of his power. 

But the skeptic need not go back to the past for 
an illustration of the power of Christ to awaken in 
human souls '' The Enthusiasm of Humanity." 
Christ declared one object of his mission to be '' to 
set at liberty them that are bruised." A great na- 
tion inspired by the spirit of service has given its 
money, its food, its sons and daughters, to set at 
liberty a people who were being cruelly bruised by 
oppression. The fact that Catholics, Protestants, 
Jews and agnostics have all united in this service 
gives evidence that the Christian spirit has over- 



6o WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

flowed all the bounds set by creeds, rituals, church 
ordinances, and church organizations. 

Nor is this a mere transient enthusiasm produced 
by the war. It has been intensified by the demands 
of sorrow and suffering brought to our conscious- 
ness by the war, but it existed before the war broke 
upon us with its sad surprise and it continues after 
the war, though the cannon have ceased their clam- 
orous demands. There never was a time in the his- 
tory of the world when so many men and women 
were engaged in varied endeavors to relieve and 
succor their suffering fellbw-men. Look once more 
at these words of Jesus defining his mission and 
compare with them what men and women of our 
time, of every sect and of none at all, are doing 
to fulfill that mission, often with no consciousness 
that it is a Christian niission which they are ful- 
filling and that the spirit which inspires them came 
from the Man of Nazareth. 

It is this Christ spirit which inspires the move- 
ment throughout Christendom not merely to amelio- 
rate the sufferings of the poor but to abolish poverty. 
The social reformers of our time are not always 
wise in their methods nor Christ-like in their spirit. 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 6i 

T(x> often social reform has been marred by class 
envy, jealousy and greed. Nevertheless the Christ 
spirit has animated many single-taxers who have 
attributed all poverty to the private ownership of 
land, many socialists who have attributed it to a 
false organization of productive industry, and some 
political teachers who have endeavored to inspire 
their scholars with the ambition to cure poverty by 
bringing about a better distribution of wealth. 

It is this Christ spirit which has inspired society 
with the endeavor to discover some form of help 
for every form of physical handicap, — limbs for 
the lame, eyes for the blind, hospitals for the sick, 
institutions for the defective and the insane. 

It is this Christ spirit which marvellously ani- 
mating at the same time Russia, England and 
America, abolished in the last century serfdom from 
Russia and .slavery from the West Indies and the 
United States. 

It is this Christ spirit which has inspired what is 
inadequately termed prison reform, but what is 
nothing less than an endeavor to provide a cure for 
crime, not merely a punishment, to fit punisliment 
to the criminal rather than to the crime and so make 



62 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

the object of criminal law the protection of the 
community and the cure of crime, not the gratifi- 
cation of revenge. 

It is this Christ spirit, seeking by a common 
effort to save society from the ignorance which 
imperils it, which has created and maintains the 
pubHc school ; has established social settlements ; has 
inspired the better forms of socialism; and has sent 
thousands of Christian teachers, doctors and 
preachers to carry into foreign lands and into the 
poorer portions of our own land, the message of 
Christ's sermon at Nazareth. 

When Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said 
*' Receive ye the Holy Spirit,'' he did but symbolize 
that inspiration which, by his teaching, his life, and 
his unseen but not unrealized companionship, he 
has been giving throughout the centuries in his loyal 
friends and followers, and what he then said to 
the eleven, he has been saying to all who love him 
and love the truth and life which he has exempli- 
fied: *' As the Father hath sent me into the world, 
even so send I you into the world." They who 
have accepted this commission, though they never 
knew who gave it to them, they who have accepted 



GLAD TIDINGS TO THE POOR 63 

this spirit of love, service and sacrifice, though they 
knew not whence it came, are his followers. There 
have been in the church many an ambitious Caiphas 
and many a greedy Judas who were none of his; 
and there have been without the church many a 
repentant and generous Zaccheus who have made 
him their guest without knowing whom they enter- 
tained, and many an heretical Good Samaritan who 
has manifested by his life the spirit of Jesus though 
he worshiped not in Jerusalem. 

These works of charity have not been prescribed 
by rule or required by law. They have been a 
spontaneous activity of an inward spirit. They 
are an evident fulfillment of Christ's second defini- 
tion of his mission. To that definition I next 
direct the reader's attention. 



CHAPTER V 

I AM COME TO GIVE LIFB 

As FAR back as I can remember I always wished 
to be a Christian. Bat I curiously failed to under- 
stand what the Christian life is. I thought to be a 
Christian meant to live in obedience to the laws of 
God. But when I compared my life with the laws 
of Grod as embodied in the Ten Commandments 
and said to myself what the rich young ruler said 
to Jesus, "All these things have I kept from my 
youth up/* I had to add this question, *' What lack 
I yet?'' From that feeling of lack I could never 
escape. In fact without knowing it, I was a Jew, 
not a Christian. Perhaps I should say a Christian 
Jew. For I found in the teachings of Jesus, as, 
for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, a higher 
standard of character than in the Ten Command- 
ments. As I studied not only his teachings but his 
life, the desire to be like him increased, but the 
difficulty of conforming my life to this higher 

64 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE \ % 

Standard also increased. As I look back upon that 
epoch in my life, it appears to me that I was like 
a pupil in a sculptor's studio. There was before 
me the work of a master. I imagined that I was 
plastic clay and had to model myself into a copy 
of the orignial. But I found that I was not plastic 
clay, and however conscientiously I tried to repro- 
duce the original, I always failed. 

It was not until at about eighteen years of age I 
came under the influence of Henry Ward Beecher's 
preaching that I began to understand that Jesus 
Christ is not a lawgiver but a lifegiver, and that 
one is not a Christian because he obeys the laws of 
God, but he obeys the laws of God because he is a 
Christian. This change in my conception of the 
Christian life was gradual. I cannot recollect how 
and when it began, though curiously I can recollect 
some apparently insignificant incidents which con- 
tributed to it. One was a little booklet by Dr. 
Mahan entitled, if I remember aright, " The Fox- 
Hunter,'' based on the verse in the Song of Songs : 
"Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the 
vines." Another influence was a sentence picked 
up somewhere in my reading, attributed to Angus- 



66 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

tine: " Please to do right; then do as you please." 
But the sentence which most clearly gave to me the 
clew to the true interpretation of the Gospel as inter- 
preted by Jesus Christ in his teaching and by Paul 
in his Epistles, is the second definition which Jesus 
Christ gave of his mission: ^' The thief cometh 
not but for to steal and to kill and to destroy ; I am 
come that they might have life and that they might 
have it more abundantly." 

Religion has often, I think has generally, been a 
restraint, a hindrance, a prohibition upon life. 
Such was the religion of the Pharisees in the First 
Century, of the ascetics in the Middle Ages, of the 
Puritans in the Seventeenth Century. That notion 
of religion Jesus repudiated. Whatever lowers 
vitality, lessens life, narrows it, impoverishes it, 
by whatever name it is called, whatever authority 
commands it, is anti-Christian. Christ declared 
his mission to be to develop life, enlarge its sphere, 
increase its activities, ennoble its character. The 
life which he comes to impart transcends all defini- 
tions. Paul is not speaking of a future heaven but 
of a present Christian experience when he says: 
*' Eye hath not seen, nor car heard, neither have 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 67 

entered into the heart of man, the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love him." Not 
because it is a perfect definition, but because it is 
the last I have happened to light upon in my reading 
and is wholly free from theological phraseology, I 
quote the following sentence from the Journal of 
Henri Frederic Amiel: 

As I understand it, Christianity is above all religious, 
and religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and 
supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its 
fruits, a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusi- 
asm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness 
which overflows. Religion, in short, is a state of the 
soul. 

The religion of Jesus Christ is a religion of 
liberty, not of law; of affirmations and inspirations, 
not of negations and prohibitions. For " Thou 
shalt not '' Christ substitutes " Thou canst.'' Thus 
his Gospel is called the ''power of God'' because 
he inspires us to believe that in companionship with 
God we can accept our aspirations as divine guides 
and can hope that our ideals can in time be by us 
realized. Judaism said " No idols " ; Christ says, 
'' God is spirit; worship him in spirit and in truth." 



68 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Judaism said *' Thou shalt not steal " ; Christ says 
" Give to him that asketh of thee/' Judaism said, 
inflict on the wrongdoer no greater injury than he 
has inflicted on the wronged — " An eye for an eye, 
a tooth for a tooth '' ; Jesus says, resist not the 
wrong; overcome his evil by your good. 

To interpret these as commands is wholly to 
mistake their meaning. They are inspirations. 
The laws of Christ are not commands imposed from 
without, exacting obedience; they are interpreta- 
tions of an inward life, endowments with a God- 
like power, promises of a divine perfection. Their 
meaning is made clear by the conclusion to which 
they lead: Ye may be the children of your Fa- 
ther who is in heaven; ye can become perfect 
even as your Father in heaven is perfect. The 
Sermon on the Mount, which has been so often 
misinterpreted as analogous to the Ten Command- 
ments, only more spiritual, contains the promise 
of divine life as a free gift from the Father to all 
who seek it: *' If ye then, being evil, know how 
to give good gifts unto your children, how much 
more shall your Father which is in heaven give the 
spirit of holiness to them that ask him? '' 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 6q 

It is extraordinary to what extent the law o£ 
taboo has found its way into the teaching of the 
church despite the teaching of its Master. The 
church has prohibited dancing; Christ never refers 
to dancing except with imphed approval. The 
church has urged fasting and discouraged feasting; 
Christ did not fast and never declined an invita- 
tion to a festivity. The church has frowned upon 
fiction; Christ was a past-master in the art of story- 
telling. The church has prohibited thinking; 
Christ habitually provoked men to think for them- 
selves, sometimes by calling on the questioner to 
answer his own question: "Who, thinkest thou, 
was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves ? " 
Sometimes by putting questions to his congregation 
and inviting their answer: "What think ye of 
Christ? Whose son is he? '' 

The church has often prescribed rules for the 
regulation of conduct. Jesus Christ prescribed no 
rules; he inculcated principles; and he inspired his 
disciples with a new spirit of life. Rules are tem- 
porary; principles are permanent; and the spirit of 
faith and hope and love is eternal. It knows no 
limitations of time or space. The minister is con- 



70 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

tinually asked to-day "Where shall I draw the 
line?'* The answer of Jesus Christ would be 
" There are no lines/' He would not teach that 
knocking balls around a green lawn is right be- 
cause that is croquet and knocking balls around a 
green table is wrong because that is billiards. He 
would not teach that cards are right if you have 
historical names on them and wrong if you have 
spades and hearts on them. He would not teach 
that it is right to have a tableau or a charade in a 
church sociable and wrong to see a play given by 
professionals in a theater. He would not teach 
that it is wrong to wear precious jewels and right 
to wear precious flowers. He would teach this: 
No enjoyment is right that does not help to develop 
manhood and womanhood; and no enjoyment is 
wrong that does help to develop manhood and 
womanhood. What is luxury? A comfort that 
enervates. What is comfort? A luxury that does 
not enervate. The life is more than meat; the body 
is more than raiment. Personality is more than 
things. All things are right which contribute to 
character; all things are wrong which deteriorate 
character. 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 71 

But Christ not only inspired this life by his 
teaching, it radiated from his person. 

There is power in law enforced by police. There 
is greater power in truth which fits the door of the 
mind as the key fits the lock and gains entrance to 
the fast locked soul. There is still greater power 
in example, which is truth expressed by action. But 
the greatest power of all is that of a great per- 
sonality. Psychology has never disclosed its secret 
or explained the nature of its operation. No edu- 
cator can impart it. It is not inherited; its pos- 
sessor cannot bequeath it to his children. It made 
Thomas Arnold a great teacher, Robert E. Lee a 
great general, Abraham Lincoln a great leader, 
Phillips Brooks a great preacher. It is not con- 
sciously put forth; it insensibly emanates. I once 
knew a woman on whose gravestone might well be 
inscribed the text " Blessed are the peace-makers." 
I do not know that she ever intermeddled in a 
quarrel; but in her presence turmoil was an imper- 
tinent intrusion, and to her home we came as to a 
sanctuary whither the worries and the strifes of 
life could not follow. 

This power of personality Christ possessed to an 



^2 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

eminent degree. Alone he faced the desecrators 
of the Temple and they fled before him. Unarmed 
he faced the mob and it parted and gave him a safe 
passage. Officers came to arrest him and returned 
only to report their failure because, Never man 
spake like this man. Men who lived with him were 
transformed by their companionship. Peter, imr 
pulsive, ardent, self-confident, pushing forward into 
a forewarned danger and denying his Lord when 
that danger was imminent, became rocklike in his 
steadfastness, and when brought before the Jewish 
Council answered its order forbidding him to 
preach with, '' We ought to obey God rather than 
man," and followed it with a forbidden Gospel 
sermon on the spot. John, by nature so vociferant 
that he was called a " son of thunder,'' and so 
ambitious that on the last journey of his Master to 
Jerusalem he sought for himself and his brother 
the first places in the anticipated kingdom of God, 
became the preeminent apostle of gentleness and 
love. And Thomas, so resolutely skeptical that he 
would not accept any evidence of the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, when vanquished by his Master's 
personal presence uttered the supremest confession 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 73 

of faith recorded in the New Testament in his 
greeting, " My Lord and my God." \^ 

This power of inspiring personaHty did not cease 
with his death. Transmitted to his disciples it has 
remained the one greatest single influence in the 
history of the world for the last eighteen centuries. 
It has always overflowed the boundaries of the 
church and often exerted its influence in spite of the 
hostility of the ecclesiastics. The church has 
rarely comprehended the nature and extent of the 
influence which its Master has had upon mankind. 
If we want to know what is the life which he came 
to give, we must ask history what is the life which 
he has given. 

To depict accurately the change in the life of the 
world which has been wrought by the influence of 
Jesus Christ would be quite beyond the limits of 
this chapter, as it would be quite beyond the power 
of the writer. But it is possible to suggest some 
aspects of that influence. Its effect on man's 
understanding of God and of the life acceptable to 
him and so of the nature of both private and public 
worship, I shall consider in a future chapter. Its 
effect on man's political and social life I have 



74 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

already briefly indicated. It has given him faith 
in himself and in his suprenmcy over nature and is 
giving him faith in his fellow man as a child of 
God. The statement in the opening chapter of 
Grenesis that God made man in his own image and 
gave him dominion over the earth and its forces 
and inhabitants is the secret of all scientific 
progress; the statement of Jesus Christ in the New 
Testament, '' Be ye not called Master for one is 
your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren,'' 
is the secret of all social progress. Slowly finding 
its way into the consciousness of the human race, 
it is substituting a democratic brotherhood for a 
feudal aristocracy, developing a widening and a 
spiritual charity, organizing public systems of 
education, inspiring a mutual interest and a mutual 
respect, creating a public opinion almost wholly 
unknown in the ancient world, and thus laying the 
foundation for free popular governments which 
can exist only when they are based on a common 
intellectual and moral life. 

The effects of Christ's influence on four chief 
symbolical expressions of the inner life of man — 
architecture, painting, poetry and music — is less 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 75 

frequently recognized, but if more indirect is 
scarcely less apparent. 

It might be thought that a religious faith that 
God does not dwell in temples made with hands 
would be fatal to church architecture. Such, how- 
ever, was not the case. The early Italian churches 
were in some cases pagan temples, as the Pantheon 
at Rome, or imitations of the pagan temples. But 
as the Christian church, moving northward, escaped 
from the dominating influence of Roman paganism, 
it created a new architecture for itself. The term 
Gothic, applied to it originally in derision, has 
become the accepted designation of this type of 
architecture, which was, however, so distinctive in 
its character, and so evidently inspired by religious 
motives, that it might well have received the 
designation which excellent authority has proposed 
to give it — Christian architecture. The cathe- 
drals of Europe have well been called frozen music; 
they are symphonies of praise in stone. The domi- 
nant motive of the architects, builders and workmen 
was religious, as the dominating motive which 
inspires and shapes our railroad stations, factories 
and skyscrapers is commercial. Thus each type of 



76 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

architecture interprets, because it expresses, the life 
of the people who have created it. The interpre- 
tation of the Gothic which Ruskin gives in his 
^' Seven Lamps of Architecture " has been criticized, 
perhaps justly; yet every impressionable mind must 
have felt in such edifices as the cathedrals of 
Cologne, Rheims, Salisbury, and Canterbury that 
sevenfold message of sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, 
life, memory and obedience, which Ruskin has dis- 
cowred in them. Nor is it fanciful to see in their 
aerial brightness an expression of the gladness of 
heart and in their spires and pinnacles and pointed 
arches a symbol of the heavenward aspiration of 
the worshipers who gathered within their walls. 

The first aim of the nascent Christian church was 
to tell men the story of Christ's life. It saw in 
Christ the ideal of humanity and in every incident 
of his life an inspiration for his followers. This 
story could not be told by the pen, except to the 
few, for the many could not read. It was told to 
the many by the brush, for every one could see and 
could comprehend the picture. Mrs. Jameson, in 
her '' History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works 
of Art," has shown how the whole history of that 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE ^^ 

life, from the Nativity to the Resurrection, was 
told by artists. And ever}^ picture was a sermon. 
That the first great pictures were of religious 
scenes and were painted for the church, is not due 
to the mere fact that the church created a com- 
mercial demand for them. Christianity had in- 
spired a recognition of the value of the deeper 
life of the spirit, and it was inevitable that as soon 
as culture was Christianized the artist should invent 
a new medium for the artistic interpretation of this 
deeper life. " It is Christianity,'' says Charles 
Blanc, '' which has supplanted sculpture by placing 
beauty of soul above that of the body.'' 

With the birth of painting came the birth of a 
new kind of poetry. In the " Te Deum Laudamus," 
which is known to have been in use from the 
beginning of the sixth century, with adoration are 
mingled the tenderer feelings of penitence, of per- 
sonal affection and of confident trust, unknown in 
even the best of Greek and Roman poets. Nor is 
it only sacred hymnology which has felt the effect 
of the Christian life. Not only in Dante's '' In- 
ferno," '' Purgatorio," and '' Paradiso," not only in 
Milton's '' Paradise Lost " and " Paradise Re- 



78 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

gained," not only in Whitticr's *' Eternal Goodness " 
and Longfellow's " Christus " is that influence to 
be seen, but scarcely less in the note of human 
experience found in such poems as Tennyson's " In 
Memoriam '" and Browning's '' Ring and the 
Book " ; and that this difference is not wholly due 
to intellectual development is. apparent to any one 
who will compare with them the exquisite paganism 
of Shelley's verse. 

Still more apparent is the influence of Christianity 
on music. Professor Edward Dickinson interprets 
well this influence in his statement that a new energy 
entered the art of music when enlisted in the min- 
istry of the religion of Christ, because a new spirit, 
unknown to the Greek, the Roman and even to the 
Hebrew, had taken possession of religious conscious- 
ness. The word music, as it occurs in Greek and 
Latin literature, means something very different 
from the meaning now attached to that word. 
Little is kn'own of the art as it was practiced among 
either the ancient Greeks and Romans or among the 
Hebrews, but it was certainly of a most primitive 
description. The works on music in Greek did not 
concern the art as we understand it, and pagan 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 79 

Rome is not known to have produced a single work 
on the subject, nor did it add anything to either 
the knowledge of music as a science or the practice 
of music as an art. Music as we now know it, with 
melody and harmony, did not exist prior to the 
Christian era. Its existence is primarily due to an 
endeavor to find some fitting vocal expression for 
the emotions which Christianity had called into 
being. It is a gift of Christianity to mankind. 
Thus it is that though the Founder of Christianity 
is not known to have written a single verse, or a line 
of music, or to have drawn a picture or planned 
an edifice, music, poetry, painting, and architecture 
were all new born in his birth at Bethlehem. 

It may be said with confidence that there would 
neither be a commercial credit system, nor a post 
office, nor a public school system, nor political nor 
industrial liberty if the world had never known the 
influence of Jesus Christ, since they never have 
existed where that influence has not been known. 
Architecture, literature, painting, music, material 
progress, political freedom and the social order all 
owe an inestimable debt to Jesus Christ, and they 
are all witnesses to the life which he has given to 



8o WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

the world. Every material, visible, audible thing in 
modem life is Christian in so far as it possesses the 
Christian spirit. The Sistine Madonna is no less 
truly Christian than the Apostles' Creed; Bach's 
Passion music is no less truly Christian than the 
Catholic Mass or the Puritan prayer meeting; the 
Salvation Army is no less truly Christian than the 
church, whatever the history of its orders. There 
is no more reason why a Christian congregation 
should be confined to the Apostles' Creed or the 
Nicene Creed as a statement of its faith than why 
it should be confined to the psalms of David in its 
praises or to a reproduction in its windows of the 
pictures on the walls of the catacombs. 

But neither civilization nor ecclesiasticism are 
Christianity. It is the spirit of love, service and 
sacrifice; love for his fellow man, the service of 
his fellow man, sacrifice for his fellow man; the 
life inspired by the love of God for his children, 
the service of God for his children, the sacrifice of 
God for his children. It is the life of God in the 
soul of man. It is in the creed but it is more than 
all the creeds; in the worship but is more than all 
the rituals; in the institutions of a free people but 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 81 

is more than all their institutions. In all the activ- 
ities of the so-called Christian Church as in all the 
activities of the so-called Christian State, it is 
alloyed with traditionalisnij superstition, ignorance 
and selfishness. It is power, liberty, life work- 
ing its way out in imperfect media and in spite of 
conscious and unconscious hostility into its final 
and perfect expression. It comes as spring comes, 
which melts the ice and sets free the brooks, clothes 
the earth with its garment of green, decorates it 
with flowers and begins to prepare the summer and 
autumn fruits; but spring is more than singing 
brooks and growing grass and promise-bearing 
buds. The Christian life can no more be confined 
within a church and its creeds, its rituals, and its 
activities than spring can be confined within a 
favored garden by a fence. A reverent skepticism 
may have in it more of the spirit of Christ than 
an irreverent credulity. Voltaire in making war 
against a cruel superstition falsely labeled Christian 
may have been as truly serving God in France as 
John Wesley in preaching the freedom of the Gospel 
in England. The passion of philanthropy in our 
time — healing the sick, teaching the ignorant. 



82 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

comforting the sorrowful, and fighting the battles 
of justice and liberty for the whole world — is as 
truly a revival of Christ's religion as any that was 
ever nurtured under church roofs. He who, in- 
spired by the divine life of love, service and sacri- 
fice, is carrying glad tidings to the poor, deliver- 
ance to the captive, sight to the blind, and liberty 
to the bruised is a follower of Jesus Christ. 

What is the secret of the life which Jesus Christ 
bestowed upon the world by his teaching, his 
example and his person, he tells us in his fourth 
definition of his mission. Just before his death 
Jesus called his disciples together for a last con- 
ference, and he brought that sacred conference to 
its close by a prayer which produced so profound 
^n influence upon his disciples that one of their 
number subsequently wrote it down and years 
afterward gave it to the world. In the opening 
sentences of that prayer Christ pours forth out of 
a full heart a solemn thanksgiving to the Father 
for the mission with which he has been entrusted, 
and thus expresses the very secret of that mission: 
'' Thou hast given him power over all flesh that he 
should give eternal life to as many as thou hast 



I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE 83 

given him. And this is life eternal, that they might 
know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ 
whom thou hast sent/' 

What eternal life means to others, what it should 
mean to others, I have neither the ability nor the 
ambition to tell. This is simply a narrative of what 
it has meant to me in my life, and here I interrupt 
the narrative in order to indicate in the next chapter 
the message of the Old Testament prophets who 
have helped me by their message to understand the 
mission of the Christ. 



CHAPTER VI 

I AM COME TO FULFILL THE LAW AND THE 
PROPHETS 

Professor William James in his interesting 
volume on *' Varieties of Religious Experience/' 
thus summarizes his survey of the field of religion: 
" The warring gods and formulas of the various 
religions do indeed cancel each other; but there is a 
certain uniform deliverance in which religions all 
appear to meet. It consists of two parts: (i) An 
uneasiness; and (2) its solution. The uneasiness, 
reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is 
something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 
The solution is a sense that we are saved from this 
wrongness by making connection with the higher 
powers.'' 

There are then two questions which religion has 
to answer: First, What are the higher powers? 
Second, How shall we make proper connection with 
them? Before considering the answer of Jesus to 

84 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 85 

these two questions of religion, What are the 
higher powers, and How can man make proper con- 
nection with them to remedy the present wrong- 
ness, it is necessary to consider the answer of 
Judaism, which Jesus came to interpret and com- 
plete. 

In studying the life and literature of the ancient 
Hebrews as portrayed in the Old Testament the 
student should always bear in mind a simple prin- 
ciple which has often been ignored, alike by the 
critics and the eulogists of that collection. The 
Old Testament represents the developing life of a 
people through a period of at least a thousand 
years. It therefore portrays the crudities, the 
errors, and the vices of a people out of which they 
have been led, no less than the principles incul- 
cated by their leaders. And in the Old Testament 
the defects in the national character are depicted 
with extraordinary fidelity. But in attempting to 
estimate the influence of any people upon modem 
thought and life we do not measure that influence 
by the ignorances, superstitions, and falsities of the 
common people, but by the truths which their great 
leaders have interpreted. We do not think the 



86 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

message of Great Britain has been absolutism be- 
cause the Stuarts were absolutists, nor that the 
message of America is the righteousness of slavery 
because at one time in its history it maintained an 
almost pagan slave system. England is interpreted 
by its overthrow of the Stuarts and America by its 
emancipation of the slaves. The slaughter of the 
Canaanites and the imprecatory psalms are not a 
part of the message of Israel. They indicate the 
native savagery of the people and make more 
luminous the message of their prophetic leaders. 

And this message itself was a developing mes- 
sage. The truth of God grows in the mind of a 
race as in the mind of an individual. In measuring 
the character and influence of a nation, we have to 
consider, not its condition at any one stage of its 
progress, but the direction in which it progressed; 
not the opinions of its majority, but the ideals of 
its leaders. 

The Hebrew prophets were not the first monothe- 

; ists. The great thinkers in all ages of the world 

f and in all forms of religion have tended toward 

I behef in one Infinite and Eternal Energy. This 

was the philosophy, if it was not the faith, of the 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 87 

spiritual aristocracy of India and of Egypt in 
periods prior to any history of Israel which we 
possess. On the other hand, it is quite certain that 
in the early history of Israel the people believed in 
many gods; they rested content in the conviction 
that their God, Jehovah, was superior to the gods 
of the peoples round about. And it is by no means 
certain that this popular opinion was not for a 
time shared by some of their eminent leaders. 

What was peculiar to the ancient Hebrews was 
their faith in a human God. The pagan nations 
with whom they had any acquaintance looked 
through nature to nature's god. Nature was to 
them the symbol and the interpretation of the 
Deity. Nature, therefore, in its various manifesta- 
tions, was the object of their reverence. Nature 
reverence took on a great variety of forms, from 
the worship of the sun to the worship of the sacred 
ox or the sacred beetle. Israel from the very 
beginning of its history was led elsewhere for its 
symbol and interpretation of Deity. Its prophets 
looked, not through nature to nature's god, but 
through humanity to humanity's God. Signs of 
polytheism there are in Israel's history — that is, 



88 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

the recognition, if not the adoration, of many gods; 
but there are no signs of nature worship except in 
occasional scathing condemnation of it as a depar- 
ture from the faith of the fathers. The philoso- 
phers have coined a long word to represent this 
faith in a human God; they call it anthropomor- 
phism, from two Greek words, meaning in the form 
: of man. The religion of Israel was frankly 
anthropomorphic. 

' This, their fundamental faith, does not merely 
appear in the declaration of the first chapter of 
Genesis that God made man in his own image. It 
is easy to put too much emphasis on a single text. 
That conception of creation might have been, and 
perhaps was, borrowed from a foreign and earlier 
source. But the whole Jewish conception of God, 
life, and duty rested on and was developed out of 
this idea — that it is within, not without, in the 
intellectual and moral life of man, not in the forms 
and phenomena of nature, that man is to look for 
his interpretation of the Being whom he is to rever- 
ence and obey. 

This belief is imphed in the visit of the three 
angels of the Lord to Abraham in his tent; in 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 89 

the report that Jehovah wrote the Ten Command- 
ments with his finger on the tables of stone; in 
the appearance at Jericho of the captain of Je- 
hovah's host as a man with drawn sword in his 
hand; in the similar appearance of the Lord of 
Hosts, in the Temple, to Isaiah; and in the vision 
of the Son of God in the fiery furnace with the 
three Hebrew children. It is implied in the figures 
of prophet and poet, who compare God rarely to 
any physical object, habitually to a human life. 
Like as a shepherd shepherdeth his sheep ; like as a 
king ruleth over his people; like as a father pitieth 
his children; like as a mother comforteth her 
child — these and such as these figures direct the 
thoughts of Israel inward in their search for the 
Eternal. The customary prophetic phrase, '' Thus 
saith Jehovah,'' inevitably suggests a human God 
speaking to his earthly companion. 

Nor was this conception confined to the seers and 
prophets. It characterized the Temple service. In 
the Holy of Holies of all heathen temples a symbol 
of the Deity was enshrined. Such a symbol was 
enshrined in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish 
Temple. But there it was not an image of a phys- 



90 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

ical object, but a symbol of a human experience. 
The symbols of the Deity were the Ten Command- 
ments and the Altar* of Mercy. Thus the Temple 
repeated the message of the prophets, saying, 
Would you know whom to worship ? Look within. 
Worship the God who is interpreted by the law 
written in your conscience and by the compassion 
which you feel for the suffering and the sinful. It 
is not power, it is justice and mercy, which make 
Jehovah worthy of your reverence and your 
loyalty. 

As the Jewish religion thus taught its votaries 
the humanness of God, it taught also, and by the 
same figures, the divinity of man. Man was 
made in the image of God; into man God has 
breathed the breath of his own life. Man is the 
offspring of God. Thus the same fundamental 
conception of man's origin and nature taught the 
ancient Jew the approachableness of God and the 
dignity of man. And this aspect of man's inherent 
worth and dignity is not dependent on a single text. 
It is implicit in the whole religious and political 
history of Israel. It is involved in the doctrine of 
possible fellowship between God and man, which is 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 91 

perhaps the most distinguishing note of the Old 
Testament. God is something* more and other 
than a Creator and Ruler concealed behind nature ; 
he is the Friend and Companion of man, and gives 
him law and counsel and comfort. Jehovah, said the 
Psalmist, is my shepherd. He leadeth me beside the 
still waters. If I stray, he restoreth my soul. If 
I come into darkness and the valley of the shadow 
of death, he goes with me there. He is my refuge 
and my fortress. Unknown he may be; but I can 
dwell in the secret place of the Host High: I can 
abide under the shadow of the Almighty. 

And he is represented as with Israel not only in 
his hours of devotion but in his common tasks. It 
is he who inspires the artisan to devise cunning 
works in gold and in silver, to cut the stone and 
carve the timber and embroider the cloths for the 
Temple service. It is he who teaches the farmer 
how to plow and harvest and sow his fields and how 
to thresh his wheat and winnow it. It is he who 
enables the warrior to run through an opposing troop 
and leap in his flight over an obstructing wall; he 
who enables the hunter to scale the dangerous preci- 
pice. So close is his companionship with Israel that 



92 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

to commune with one's own soul is to commune with 
him. " Jehovah will hear when I call upon him. 
Stand in awe and sin not ; commune with your own 
heart upon your bed and be still." ^ '' To the Jew/' 
says James Cotter Morison, ** God is the Great Com- 
panion, the profound and loving, yet terrible, friend 
of his inmost soul, with whom he holds communion 
in the sanctuary of his heart, to whom he turns or 
should turn, in every hour of adversity or happi- 
f ness.'' ^ All this implies not only faith in God, it 
also implies faith in oneself as being of kin to God 
and fitted for companionship with him. 
I / But did not Israel believe that the race had fallen 
I / and in that fall had lost this companionship ? No ! / 
i There is not the least evidence that the Israelitish 
people held any such opinion. There is in the third 
chapter of Genesis ^a parable of sin and fall, which 
truly interprets the individual experience of every 
soul when it steps aside from the path of innocency; 
but there is nothing in that chapter to indicate that 
the writer of it believed that the whole human race 
sinned in Adam and fell with him in the great 

1 Psalms 23:91; Exodus 31:1-10; Isaiah 28:23-28; Psalms 
18:29-32, 4:3, 4. 
2 "The Service of Man," p. 181. 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 93 

transgression. No such doctrine is to be found, 
either expressed or impHed, in the religious teach- 
ings of the Old Testament. There is not, after 
the third chapter of Genesis, from Genesis to 
Malachi, any reference to the fall of man; nor any 
in the New Testament except incidentally and by 
way of suggestion in two of Paul's letters. It is a 
curious illustration of the unscripturalness of much 
of our theology that this doctrine of a historic fall 
and resultant depravity, which has been made one 
of the foundation stones of Christian theology, has 
nothing in the Bible to support it except a parable 
in the Old Testament and a parenthesis in the 
New Testament. 

It is because man is thus of kin to God that he 
can understand the law. That law is addressed 
to his reason and his conscience. It is always por- 
trayed as a reasonable and a just law, which is 
only another way of saying that it appeals to man's 
reason and sense of justice. In truth, the law 
was not something external given to him ; it was 
an interpretation to him of his own nature. The 
law was the law of his own being; its enunciation 
by the prophet was simply an interpretation to him 



94 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

of himself. He had only to look within to find its 
verification and its sanction. Jehovah is portrayed 
by the author of the Book of Deuteronomy as 
saying to Israel : 

For this commandment which I command thee this 
day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It 
is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go 
up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may 
hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that 
thou shouldest say. Who shall go over the sea for us and 
bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? But the 
word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy 
heart, that thou mayest do it. . . . 

This was the fundamental teaching of the 
prophets of the Old Testament — that God dwells 
with man and dwells in man. 

This truth is dramatically illustrated in the 
experience of Elijah. Disappointed by the failure 
of his attempted reformation of religion, finding 
the worship of Baal very much alive although many 
of the priests of Baal had been slain, his life 
threatened by the Queen, himself deserted by the 
people, depressed and hoping for death, he was sum- 
moned by Jehovah for an interview at Mount 
Horab. The great convulsions of nature which he 



THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS 95 

witnessed fitted his mood but brought him no mes- 
sage. A tempest swept through the valley and 
broke in pieces the rocks, but Jehovah was not in 
the wind; an earthquake followed, he was not in 
the earthquake; volcanic fires flamed from the 
ground, he was not in the fires. But when all had 
passed by, and a great quiet followed, a still small 
voice spake to him. And the still small voice was 
the voice of his God and brought him God's mes- 
sage. 

This truth that God dwells with man and in man 
is interpreted in Israel's declaration that he whom 
the heaven of heavens cannot contain dwells in the 
man of a humble heart and a contrite spirit. And 
it interprets the universal presence of God as ex- 
pressed in such a passage as the 139th Psalm: 

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 

or whither shall I flee from thy face? 
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there, 

or if I make Hades my bed, lo, thou art there. 
If I lift up the wings of the dawn, 

and settle at the farther end of the sea. 
Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

and thy right hand take hold of me. 
And if I say, *' Let deep darkness screen me, 

and the light about me be night,'' 



96 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Even darkness is not dark with thee, 
but the night is clear as the day — 
the darkness is equal to the light.^ 

God's presence is intimate, continuous, inescap- 
I able. Man cannot escape from God because God 
I dwells in man and man cannot escape from himself. 
I This faith of the Hebrew prophets that God is a 
human God we must comprehend if we would com- 
prehend the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth 
as they w^ere seen, understood and interpreted by his 
disciples after his death. To an interpretation of 
that life and teaching I invite the reader in the 
next chapter. 
^ F. Cheyne's translation. 



CHAPTER VII 

I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 

In the Episcopal version of the Psalter occurs 
this sentence : '' Thou, O Lord God, art the thing 
that I long for: Thou art my hope even from my 
youth." That sentence expresses what has been 
my longing from my youth, and that longing is 
satisfied by Jesus Christ. 

When I began my systematic studies in the life 
of Jesus of Nazareth I had an imaginary conception 
of God as an always just and sometimes merciful 
king, sitting on a great white throne, ruling the 
universe, to whom I might send my prayers by a 
kind of wireless telegraphy, though wireless teleg- 
raphy was not then known, and from whom I might 
get responses chiefly through either the church or 
the Bible. I really worshiped an idol, though 
made of imagination, not of wood or stone. As I 
pursued my studies in the life of Jesus, his life and 
character more and more inspired my reverence and 

97 



98 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

love. Long since that spiritual idol has disappeared 
from my temple, and its place has been taken by 
the God who has been revealed to me in the earthly 
life and character of Jesus of Nazareth. No char- 
acter that I can imagine, no character that I can 
build up out of the scattered fragments furnished 
by history and literature, can for a moment com- 
pare in my thought with what James Martineau 
has well called '' the realized ideal '' which that life 
and character furnish to the world. Discussions 
between the Unitarians and the Trinitarians have 
been largely upon the question what is the meta- 
physical relation between Jesus Christ and the 
Father of whom every family in heaven and earth 
is named. I do not know what that metaphysical 
relation is. I do not care to know. It is enough 
that to me Jesus Christ is the supreme manifesta- 
tion of the eternal God, not the manifestation of 
one part of him or of one office which he performs in 
the world, not more the manifestation of his mercy 
than of his justice, not more the manifestation of 
his tenderness than of his authority, but the mani- 
festation of the truth that God is Immanuel — that 
is, God with us. 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 99 

To state an experience in the terms of philosophy 
is always difficult, yet my philosophy and my experi- 
ence are so intermingled that I cannot separate 
them. I may perhaps express them thus: The 
veiled, invisible figure, that is always walking 
through life, always judging, befriending, forgiv- 
ing, helping men, was for one moment made so 
clear that human eyes could see him and human 
hands could handle him; then hidden from human 
eyes and escaping from human touch, he has become 
the nearer to us because he is invisible and in- 
tangible. 

Jesus came to a people trained through centuries 
of religious teaching, alike by the instructions of 
their prophets and by symbols in their temple, to 
believe that God had made man in his own image 
and therefore in man men were to look for the 
image of God. In his teaching Jesus assumed this 
Jewish point of view. He did not attempt to con- 
duct his disciples through nature to nature's God; 
he endeavored to conduct his disciples through 
humanity to humanity's God. He assumed that 
God has made man in his own image and that 
in the experiences of human nature we are to 



100 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

look for an interpretation of God's character. He 
did not define God or the conditions of fellow- 
ship with God, but he brought to his disciples 
in his life and experience a revelation or unveiling 
of the God who dwelt within him and thus showed 
to his disciples the way to fellowship with their 
Great Companion. For this purpose he took one 
of the most common and one of the most sacred 
of human relationships, that between a father and 
his child. He told them. When ye pray say, " Our 
Father.'' 

We make a great mistake if we conceive the 
*' Lord's Prayer " to be a form which Christ has pre- 
scribed. It is a spirit of approach which Christ 
illustrates. Look, he says, into your father-heart; 
it will interpret your Father to you. Do you want 
to become acquainted with God ? Go to him as your 
children come to you. What are the things you 
want? Are they not such as the following? You 
want food for the body, the mind, the spirit. Ask 
your Father for them. If your son asks of you 
bread will you give him a stone? You want for- 
giveness for the wrongs you have done? Do you 
always exact of your son the full penalty for his 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME loi 

every transgression? Do you demand an eye for 
an eye and a tooth for a tooth? If you forgive 
your children their trespasses, why doubt that your 
Father will forgive you your trespasses? Are you 
not often perplexed which road to take in life?, 
Ask your Father for guidance. Do you not some- 
times dread a temptation which looms in the dis- 
tance with threatening? Ask him to lead you by a 
path which will escape it. Does it not sometimes 
seem to you impossible to overcome the evil desires 
within or the seductive influences without you? 
Ask him to strengthen your will and give you 
power to conquer the world and your own baser 
self. Do you want his spirit, the spirit that will 
enable you to do his will, to do what you can to 
bring his rule upon the earth? He imparts his 
own spirit to those that ask him, as you love to 
impart your wisdom and your strength to your child 
by your counsel and companionship. There is 
nothing too insignificant for his concern if it con- 
cerns his child. The very hairs of your head are 
numbered. You are never beneath his notice. He 
is so great that to him nothing is small. A sparrow* 
cannot fall to the ground and he not know it. And 



102 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

in the thought of him who made you in his own 
image, you are of much more value than many 
sparrows. 

All Christ's instructions had for their aim to 
bring his disciples into fellowship with God. The 
Westminster Confession of Faith has what may be 
conceded to be an admirable and comprehensive 
conception of the Higher Powers: 

There is but one only living and true God, who is 
infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, in- 
visible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, im- 
mense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, 
most holy, most free, most absolute. 

Christ's instructions contain nothing analogous 
to this definition. He did not attempt to describe 
the attributes of God. He did not discuss and he 
did not give any information concerning such ques- 
tions as, Is God omnipotent and what does omnipo- 
tent mean? Is he omniscient, and what does 
omniscience mean? The nearest approach to a 
definition of God which is to be found in Christ's 
instructions is in the sentence, *' God is spirit" ; 
and this definition, if so it can be called, was given 
only for the purpose of making clear the sentence 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 103 

which follows, " And they that worship him must 
worship him in spirit and in truth." It was given 
for the purpose of showing us that our approach 
to God does not depend on any particular form or 
ceremony but wholly upon our spiritual sincerity 
and earnestness. In brief : 

Christ does not teach us about God ; he makes us 
acquainted with God. 

John Stuart Mill wrote in 1834 to Thomas 
Carlyle : '* I have what appears to you much the 
same thing as or even worse than no God at all, 
namely a probable God. ... I mean that the 
existence of a Creator is not to me a matter of 
faith or intuition ; and as a proposition to be proved 
by evidence it is but an hypothesis, the proofs of 
which, as you I know agree with me, do not amount 
to absolute certainty. . . . The unspeakable good it 
would be to me to have a faith like yours, I mean 
as firm as yours, on that, to you, fundamental 
point, I am as strongly conscious of when life is a 
happiness to me, as when it is, what it has been for 
long periods now past by, a burden." ^ 

No reader of Christ's teachings can doubt that to 
1 " Letters of John Stuart Mill/' vol. 1 : 90. 



104 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

him God was not an hypothesis but a personal 
and intimate friend. He did not from a study of 
the creation arrive at the conclusion that there is a 
Creator, as the scientist from a study of the arrow 
heads found in rocks, arrives at the conclusion 
that there was a prehistoric man. He was 
acquainted with God as a child is acquainted with 
his father, and his aim was, not to demonstrate by 
the scientific method the existence of a Creator, 
but to impart to his disciples a spirit of filial obe- 
dience which would give to them an experience 
of companionship with God similar to his own. 
He himself lived in continual and unbroken com- 
panionship with God; and he sought to inspire in 
his disciples a spirit which would enable them to 
live in a similar companionship. 

And he assumed that this companionship with 
God is not a special privilege of saints or scholars 
but is the common heritage of all God's children. 
He spoke to the plain people, not only in language 
which they could understand but of experiences 
which they could appreciate and of virtues which 
they could exercise. The figures he used to illus- 
trate the life of God in the sod of man were 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 105 

taken from the ordinary vocations of the common 
people; they were such as a farmer sowing his 
seed, a fisherman casting his net, a steward faithful 
to his absent lord, a woman preparing bread for 
her household, a merchant buying a valuable pearl, 
a lucky finder of a treasure hidden in a field who 
sells all that he has to purchase the field. It is of 
little children whose characters are not yet formed 
he said, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven '' ; it is 
to a miscellaneous congregation of all sorts and con- 
ditions of men he said, '' The kingdom of heaven is 
within you '' ; it is of corrupt politicians and aban- 
doned women he said that they should enter the king- 
dom of heaven before the men whose pretentious 
piety was worn as a cover for greedy hearts and 
selfish lives ; it is to a woman of the town who had 
shown her sorrow for her past life by her tears, and 
her revering acceptance of his message by anointing 
his feet with ointment that he said, " Thy faith has 
saved thee '^ ; and he whose last supper with his 
eleven personal friends we have made a church sac- 
rament, ate also with publicans and sinners in a feast 
which was not less sacramental. 

Thus the faith of Jesus in his Father was a faith 



io6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

also in his fellow men. He believed that there was 
in them something of the divine life and that it 
might be so inspired as to become an invincible 
power. This faith he showed by carrying not only 
the message of charity, but also the message of trust 
and confidence to the plain people. He told them 
that the Father trusted them and put responsibilities 
upon them. He made clear to them that the 
Father does not desire to keep his children in the 
nursery; that he desires that they grow up into 
brave, wise, strong men endowed with a noble 
manhood. And they can become brave only by 
facing danger, strong only by bearing burdens, wise 
only by solving problems. 

And he made it clear that while God is the Great 
Ruler of men and their Great Helper and their Great 
Companion, he will not impose on the indifferent un- 
sought companionship, nor force his help on those 
who desire to live without it, nor drive into his king- 
dom those who do not wish to become its citizens. 
He who desires the Father's counsel must ask for it ; 
he who desires the Father's companionship must seek 
it ; he who desires to be in the Father's kingdom and 
under the Father's rule must knock for admission. 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 107 

This truth that the Father entrusts the direction of 
their Hves to his children and gives them at once Hb- 
erty to choose and responsibihty for their choice, 
Christ illustrates by a very simple but very striking 
story. 

A father had two sons. At his death the prop- 
erty would be divided between them. But the 
younger son was not willing to wait for his father's 
death. He was impatient of control, weary of his 
home and its duties, wished to live his own life, 
carve out his own destiny, try experiments for 
himself. He came to his father with the demand, 
Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me as 
my share of the inheritance. The father did not 
refuse. He anticipated his own death, gave his son 
the inheritance which in due course would later 
come to him, and let him go forth to try the world 
for himself. It is thus the Father treats his chil- 
dren. He puts the rudder into their own hands 
and lets them choose their own course of life. 

In teaching this truth, that God entrusts to his 
children, individually and collectively, the determin- 
ation of their own destiny, Jesus carried out the 
earlier teaching of the Old Testament. It is equally 



io8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

clearly taught in Jehovah's treatment of Israel as a 
nation and in Christ's treatment of his disciples as 
pioneers in the church. 

When Moses brought the Children of Israel to 
Mt. Sinai, God did not assume to be their sovereign. 
He was elected their sovereign by popular suffrage. 
Before he gave them the Ten Commandments 
which were to be the constitution of the new 
nation, he directed Moses to put before the assembly 
of the people the question whether they would have 
him as their king. '^ Thus shalt thou tell the Chil- 
dren of Israel: If ye will obey my voice indeed 
and keep my covenant, ye shall be unto me a king- 
dom of priests and a holy nation.'' Moses brought 
to the Children of Israel this message and ** all the 
people answered together and said, all that Jehovah 
hath spoken will we do.'' Not till then was their 
constitution given them; not till then did Jehovah 
assume the sovereignty of the nation. 

Later, after they had been under the rule of 
Jehovah for over forty years and had realized the 
justice, the mercy, but also the inflexibility of his 
rule, and had taken possession of the Holy Land, 
the same question was put to the people before 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 109 

their final settlement : '* If it seem evil unto you/' 
said Joshua, " to serve Jehovah, choose ye this day 
whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your 
fathers served, that were beyond the River, or the 
gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell/' 
And he put before them very explicitly the difficulty 
of the life to which loyalty to Jehovah summoned 
them. Again the people voted whom they would 
have as their ruler. " Nay," they replied, " but 
we will serve Jehovah." 

When some centuries subsequently the author of 
Deuteronomy put before Israel a later interpreta- 
tion and amplification of the law, as it had been 
developed in the life of the nation, while the inevi- 
table result of disobedience was clearly pointed out, 
the same freedom of choice to obey or disobey was 
affirmed: ''I have set before thee life and death, 
blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both 
thou and thy seed may live." 

Finally, as the captivity of Israel in Babylon 
drew to its close, it was left to the exiles to deter- 
mine whether they would return to their native 
land and endure the difficulties and privations of a 
new settlement in a country devastated by wars, or 



no WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

would remain in comparative comfort in the land 
in which most of them were born and where they 
possessed the only home they had ever known. 
Some went, some remained. 

Thus in the four great crises of their history, 
the responsibiHty of determining their national 
destiny was thrown upon Israel by Jehovah. 

Jesus Christ dealt with his disciples in the same 
spirit. He put upon them the responsibility of 
their lives. After the twelve had been with him 
scarcely a year, he sent them out two by two, to 
carry to the villages the same message of the 
Father's love that he was carrying to the cities, 
and he left them to phrase that message, each 
according to his own understanding of it. In one 
somewhat enigmatical and often misunderstood 
passage, he told them that he gave them the keys 
of the kingdom of heaven; life was theirs, they 
could open what doors they would and what they 
would they could lock against themselves. After 
his death he put upon the disciples the responsibility 
for carrying on to its completion the work which 
he had begun. You can do the work if you will, 
he told them, but if not, it will not be done. You 



1 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME in 

can cure the world of its sins; but if you do not 
cure it, the world will not be cured.^ They should 
have his companionship as he had his Father's 
companionship. But the work would be theirs, the 
responsibility would be theirs, the results would 
depend upon them. 

And this in fact has been the case. When his 
disciples have possessed his spirit, and in that spirit 
have carried on his work, they have succeeded. 
When they have lost his spirit, when they have 
been idle and indifferent, or busy about other 
things, or have quarreled among themselves, the 
work has halted, progress has stopped, humanity 
has suffered. 

But it was not only by his words that Jesus 
taught his disciples. What should be their conduct 
toward one another he taught them by his own 
conduct; what might be their experience of God he 
taught them by his own experience. 

The fragmentary narrative of his life afforded 

by the Gospels gives us interesting indications, not 

only of the various estimates formed concerning 

him by the community, but also of the varying esti- 

1 See Appendix. 



112 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

mates formed concerning him by his disciples. The 
Pharisees scornfully asked, " How knoweth this 
man letters having never learned? '' He had never 
studied the Rabbinical books under the theological 
teachers of his time and knev^ the traditions of 
the church only to condemn them. The Messiah 
they said v^ould come out of the unknown; but as 
for this fellow — we all know where he came 
from. A Nazarene! Could any good come out of 
Nazareth? Nor was Jesus less a puzzle to the 
common people. They heard him gladly. They 
were fascinated by the charm of his personality. 
They wondered at the words of grace which flowed 
from his lips. But Messiah? Prophet? Rabbi? 
No ! Certainly not at the first hearing did they so 
judge him. He was nothing but a peasant. A 
son of the carpenter whose mother and brothers 
and sisters they knew as their neighbors and com- 
rades. 

After he had taught and healed for nearly two 
years opinions changed somewhat, but the puzzle 
continued. To some he was John the Baptizer, 
risen from the dead, to some Elijah or Jere- 
miah or some other ancient prophet come back 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 113 

again to earth as a forerunner of the Messiah. 
One of his more intimate disciples believed him 
to be the Messiah, and later it is clear that the 
other disciples held the same opinion, for James 
and John came with their mother asking for office 
when he, their king, should have established his 
kingdom. But when he died their faith died also. 
They scattered, and some of them went back to 
their fishing. The story of their master's resur- 
rection brought to them by the women seemed to 
them as idle tales. Not until their skepticism was 
overcome and they were convinced of the reality of 
the resurrection did their vanishing faith that their 
Master was the Messiah return. 

Apparently the first to believe and to teach what 
we now call the divinity of Jesus Christ was Paul. 
His study of the Old Testament during his two 
years in Arabia convinced him that the Messiah 
foretold in the Old Testament prophecy was the 
Son of God, and he came out from his retirement 
to preach in the Synagogues this new interpreta- 
tion of the ancient prophets and to follow it w^ith 
the teaching that the Jesus who had been put to 
death and had risen from the dead was this Mes- 



114 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

siah.^ 'This became the message of the apostles. 

The astonishing welcome this message received 
from the plain people in pagan lands gave life and 
body to the apostles' faith. It revealed a universal 
human need to which their message ministered. 
They remembered the appearances of the Angel of 
the Lord to patriots and prophets as narrated in 
the sacred books of their nation, and they began 
to wonder if they had not been living with the Angel 
of the Lord. They recalled that strange life and 
that extraordinary character with its puzzling but 
glorious self-contradictions: courageous but never 
combative; gentle but never timid; masterful but 
never self-assertive; simple in tastes but never 
ascetic; sympathetic with all men but compromis- 
ing with none; rejoicing in activity yet seeking 
solitude; pure in heart yet friend of sinners; 
patient with wrongs to himself but indignant with 
wrongs to others ; vanquishing a mob by the magic 
of his presence yet yielding himself up without 
resistance to the legalized force of an unjust gov- 
ernment. They looked back upon a life which 
more than fulfilled the ideals of character which 

1 Compare Acts 9 : 20 with 22. 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 115 

one of their number portrayed in a prose poem in 
praise of love. The prose poem might well serve 
as a biography of Jesus Christ by substituting for 
the word love his name. Christ " suffered long and 
still was kind; Christ envied not, vaunted not him- 
self, was not puffed up, did not behave himself un- 
seemly, sought not his own, was not easily provoked, 
thought no evil, rejoiced not in iniquity but 
rejoiced in the truth, bore all things, trusted all 
things, endured all things." 

Thus gradually their ancient Jewish faith that 
God reveals himself to man in man took on a new 
meaning. They restudied the Hebrew prophets. 
They recalled the prophet's pen-picture of the 
Messiah's life: ''He hath borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows; he was oppressed and he was 
afflicted yet he opened not his mouth.'' They 
recalled Isaiah's declaration that the Deliverer of 
Israel would be called '' Wonderful-Counselor, 
God-Hero, Father-Everlasting, Prince of Peace." ^ 
Was there ever such a w^onderful-counselor, divine 
hero, gracious and patient father, fountain and 
giver of peace? 
1 See George Adam Smith: Isaiah 11 : 140. 



ii6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Their faith in their master grew with their 
ministry. By giving their message they gained both 
clearness of vision and strength of conviction. But 
it was not until more than half a century after 
Christ's death, spent in interpreting Christ and the 
Christian life to others, that John, the clearest in 
vision of any of the twelve, gave to their faith a 
definition which, after nineteen centuries, still re- 
mains the clearest and most intelligible definition of 
the Christian's understanding of Christ which the 
Christian Church possesses: *' That which was from 
the beginning, which we have heard, which we have 
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and 
our hands have handled, of the word of life; . . * 
that which we have seen and heard declare we unto 
you that ye also may have fellowship with us ; and 
truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with 
his Son Jesus Christ."^ 

The New Testament never affirms that Jesus 
Christ is God.^ It never uses such language as 
that of the Nicene creed: '' God of God, Light of 

1 1 John 1:1,3. 

2 The language of Thomas in John 20:28, "My Lord and 
my God," is the language of emotion, not of theological defini- 
tion. 



I HAVE MANIFESTED THY NAME 117 

Light, Very God of Very God; Begotten not made; 
Being of one substance with the Father/' It never 
discusses or defines his metaphysical relation to the 
Infinite and Eternal Spirit. The declared opinions 
of theologians on such questions are their deduc- 
tions from the simpler and more spiritual faith of 
the Apostles. That faith is expressed in such decla- 
rations as that Christ is God manifest in the flesh, 
that is in a human life; that he is such a manifesta- 
tion of the Word of Life as can be looked upon, that 
is, as is possible in our present earthly condition ; that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him- 
self ; that through Christ, by our understanding of 
his spirit, we have access to the Father; that thus 
we can have fellowship with one another and with 
the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

It is not my endeavor in this book to define a phil- 
osophy but to portray an experience. My faith in 
God, in Jesus Christ, in myself, in my fellow men 
and in immortality is one single and indivisible faith. 
Let me see if I can state it simply and clearly. 

We live in two worlds — a world of matter, 
which is under inviolable law; a world of the spirit, 
which is free. God is a spirit, and is the Father of 



ii8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

our spirits. Jesus Christ is the supreme manifesta- 
tion history affords of what God is and what we 
may become. In his life of love, service and sacri- 
fice is the supreme manifestation of that life of the 
spirit which we can share with him and his Father, 
an immortal life which the decay of the instruments 
it uses does not and cannot destroy. 



CHAPTER VIII 

I HAVE COME TO SEEK AND TO SAVE THAT WHICH 
WAS LOST 

In our study of the life of Christ in my Congre- 
gational Bible class, I early came upon a fact the 
full significance of which did not at first occur to 
me, but which eventually led to a radical reconstruc- 
tion of my theology. I had thought that Jesus 
Christ bore the punishment of our sins that we 
might be released from that punishment. But I 
found to my surprise that in the teaching of Jesus 
Christ nothing was said about salvation from pun- 
ishment and much about deliverance from sin. I 
found two phrases in the New Testament translated 
forgiveness of sin: one, literally translated, is 
remission of sin; the other, deliverance from sin. 
The first regards sin as a burden which is taken 
from man; the other, regards sin as a despot from 
which man is delivered. The phrase remission of 
sins is of frequent occurrence; the phrase remission 

IIQ 



120 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

of punishment never occurs — not even once. But 
in classical Greek I could not discover that the 
phrase remission of sins ever occurred; the word, 
ordinarily translated forgiveness, signifies compas- 
sion or fellow feeling. It began to dawn upon me 
that Jesus Christ did not promise to deliver the 
repentant sinner from penalty and did promise to 
deliver him from sin. 

The difference between these two conceptions of 
salvation may be made clear by a simple illustra- 
tion. Two companions in a robbery are arrested, 
tried, convicted and sentenced to ten years' impris- 
onment. The first by political influence obtains a 
pardon, is released after a few months' impris- 
onment, and returns to his criminal companions and 
his criminal courses. The other serves out his full 
term, is converted, looks with shame upon his past 
life and with aversion upon his past companions, 
and goes out to spend the rest of his life in honest 
and honorable service. One is saved from his pun- 
ishment but not from his sin; the other is saved 
from his sin but not from his punishment ; the pun- 
ishment is one means of his salvation. 

It gradually became clear to me that it was this 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 121 

second salvation which Jesus Christ offers to the 
world and which makes his life, teachings and 
sacrifice Glad Tidings. His message as understood 
by his apostles, is interpreted by such verses as: 

Thou shalt call his name Jesus for he shall save his 
people from their sins. 

Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of 
the world. 

This cup is the New Testament in my blood which is 
shed for many for the remission of sins. 

He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (literally 
remit or send away our sins) and cleanse us from all 
unrighteousness. 

Then I went back to the Old Testament. The 
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is generally and justly 
regarded as the chapter in the Prophets which more 
than any other foretells the character and the mis- 
sion of the Messiah. It declares that the Messiah 
hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, 
that he has been wounded because of our transgres- 
sions and bruised because of our iniquities, and that 
on him the Lord has laid the iniquity of us all. 
But it does not affirm that he has been punished 



122 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

because of our transgressions, nor that the Lord 
has laid on him the punishment of our iniquities. 
It affirms that he has suffered and that with his 
stripes we are healed; but it does not affirm that 
with his stripes we are delivered from the penalty 
due to our transgressions. 

I went back to the earlier history of Israel. I 
found this truth, that God saves the repentant 
sinner from his sins illustrated by a curious object 
lesson. On the so-called Great Day of Atonement 
two goats were brought out before the Congrega- 
tion of Israel. One was offered as a sacrifice to 
Jehovah; the sins of the people were laid in con- 
fession upon the head of the other, which was then 
driven off into the wilderness and seen no more. It 
was the si)is which were sent away. 

Then I turned to the four Gospels to re-read the 
story of Christ's life and teachings. I did not find 
that he anyAvhere said that he had borne or would 
bear for his followers the consequences of their 
misconduct. I did not find that anywhere he prom- 
ised that his disciples should be relieved from the 
consequences of their misconduct. But I did find 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 123 

him teaching explicitly that their sins did not 
separate them from God's love ; on the contrary, he 
taught them that God sought them in their sins to 
recover them from their sins. 

Turn to the fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel 
and read again the three stories written there: — 
the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. What is 
the meaning of these stories? Is it not that our 
Father does not wait for us to seek him; that he 
comes seeking us; that, as Paul has expressed it, 
God has loved us while we were dead in sins; and 
as John has expressed it, " Herein is love, not that 
we loved God but that he loved us.** Our sins hide 
God from us, but they do not hide us from God. 
As sickness attracts the physician to the hospital, 
as ignorance attracts the bom teacher to the pupil, 
as the negro camp attracted General Armstrong to 
Hampton, Virginia, as the ignorance and supersti- 
tion of the tribes in Africa attracted Livingston to 
the Dark Continent, so our sins attract our Father 
to us. '' People don't love you when you are 
naughty,*' said a would-be teacher to a naughty 
child. '' But mother does," was his reply. 



124 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 



<( 



Mother does." And this mother's heart interprets 
the heart of Him who dwells in and inspires the 
love of the mother. 

What Jesus taught by his parables, he taught by 
his life. He went seeking the lost, that he might 
save them, not from their punishment but from their 
sins. In the two instances in which he saved per- 
sons from the consequencs of their sin it was made 
clear that he did so only that he might save them 
from their sin.^ He did not wait, as we too often 
do, for sinners to come to him in the synagogue or 
the temple. He went where they were. He spoke 
to them in figures drawn from their everyday life 
which they could understand. He opened doors of 
hope for those against whom the world and the 
church had closed all doors of hope. He accepted 
their invitations, shared in their festivities, com- 
forted them in their sorrows and inspired in them 
new hopes and new purposes. And his message to 
them was ever the same : '' Go, and sin no more." 
To Jesus a lost soul was a soul not yet found, and 
his life and his teaching interpreted the spirit of his 

^ John 5: 14, 8: II. 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 125 

Father who is seeking and will seek the lost until he 
find them. 

Thus gradually I came to learn one great differ- 
ence between the Christian form of religious life 
and all other forms. Other world religions repre- 
sent man as seeking God; Christianity is the only 
religion which represents God as seeking man. 

Nor did Christ wait for repentance. By his 
character even more than by his words, he inspired 
in men both sorrow for the past and aspirations for 
the future. His life was a continual illustration of 
the truth enunciated by one of his disciples: *^the 
goodness of God calleth thee to repentance." He 
did not wait for the corrupt tax gatherers to reform 
their ways before he accepted their invitations to a 
feast. He accepted those invitations as an indica- 
tion of their desire for a better life, and, to the 
complaints of his critics, replied, '* They that be 
well need not a physician but they that are sicko" 

A woman of the town came in as a spectator to 
the house where he was dining. Something in his 
words awakened in her a spirit of sorrow for the 
past and of aspiration for the future. Her tears 



126 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

fell upon his unsandalled feet stretched out behind 
him as he reclined at the table. She knelt to wipe 
away the tears with the tresses of her hair; then, 
unresisted, kissed his feet and anointed them with 
the ointment which such women constantly carried 
with them. Her hands were not clean nor her heart 
pure. But she had some desire for clean hands and 
a pure heart, and Christ asked nothing more, but 
turned to her with the message, *'Thy sins are 
forgiven.'' 

He was one day passing through Jerusalem, 
city of priests, city of tax gatherers. The Roman 
system of taxation was such that no man could 
be a tax gatherer and not be an oppressor of the 
people. He was part of an organized system of 
corruption and oppression. One of these tax gath- 
erers who was short of stature chmbed a tree 
to see the Rabbi whose fame gathered a following 
crowd about him wherever he went. Christ waited 
for no expression of repentance, but called to 
Zaccheus to come down. I will be your guest 
to-day, he said. He offered his friendship without 
waiting for any expression of repentance and by 
his friendship inspired the repentance. Before he 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 127 

left the tax gatherer's house Zaccheus had promised 
to restore fourfold to those whom he had plundered 
by false accusation and to give half of what 
remained to the poor. 

Self-confident Peter, who had resented Christ's 
warning, followed him to the Court of Caiaphas 
and there denied that he knew the Master, who 
was on trial for his life. Jesus did not wait until 
Peter went out and wept bitterly; but as he passed 
by to his trial and his death he looked with a pene- 
trating glance of love upon his disciple, and it was 
this look of love which awakened repentance in Pe- 
ter's heart and brought bitter tears to his eyes. 

Repentance is not the condition of divine love 
and mercy; it is the condition of divine forgiveness 
because an unrepentant heart is bolted against the 
entrance of forgiveness. It is not that God is 
unwilling to forgive; but forgiveness is deliverance 
from sin, and it is impossible to lift sin off from a 
man who desires to hold on to it. God says to 
every man, '' Let go your sin and I will lift it off '' ; 
but if the man will not let his sin go it cannot be 
lifted off. 

Is not this deliverance from sin that which in 



128 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

our better moments we desire for our children, our 
homes, our nation? Do we not desire for our 
children that they should be honest, truthful, brave? 
That their lips shall be unstained by profanity, their 
hands clean from greed, their hearts unpolluted by 
foul imaginings and base desires? Do we not desire 
for our homes that, whether they are rich or poor 
in their furnishings, peace and good will shall abide 
in them? Do we not wish for America that she 
shall be not merely a nation of great cities and great 
railways, but of freemen living together in accord 
under the protection of a just government? Not 
deliverance from the sorrows which sin brings but 
from the sin itself we crave : that our boys be saved, 
not from headache but from drunkenness; our 
homes not from poverty but from quarreling; our 
nation not from the wounds of war but from the 
shame of cowardice. 

Nature in a parable teaches us what the New 

Testament teaches in explicit language. Emerson 

says, '' Take what figure you will, its exact value, 

1 nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every 

I secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue 

I rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 129 

certainty/' This is but a half truth, and a half truth 
is generally a dangerous error. It is true that 
nature's laws can never be violated with impunity, 
she has no favorites, she is immutable, inexorable. 
Her laws written in the constitution of the world 
of matter and in the souls of men are never set 
aside. She does not remit the consequences of dis- 
regarding her laws. But she does repair the hurt. 
When I was a boy, in careless climbing I broke my 
arm. Nature did not say, This is a little boy, he 
meant no harm, and I will not break his arm. But 
v^hen the doctor set the arm and put it in splints, 
then nature began to knit the bone together. 
Nature punishes but it also repairs. When the dys- 
peptic ceases to violate the laws of health the 
stomach begins to repair the ravages which he has 
made in it; when the drunkard abandons his cups 
the body begins to cast out the alcoholized tissues 
and bring new healthy ones to take their place. 
And if nature is unable unaided to repair the wrong 1 
there are curative agencies in the world outside ready 
to give their aid. 

This law of healing written in material nature is 
written scarcely less clearly in the nature of man. 



130 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

When Christ bids us pray Forgive us our debts as 
we forgive our debtors, he does not make our for- 
giveness of others the standard to v^hich God con- 
forms his forgiveness. *^ What man is there of 
you," he asks, ^' of whom if his son asks bread 
will he give him a stone? If ye then being evil 
know how to give good gifts unto your children 
how much more shall your Father which is in 
heaven give good things to him that ask them/' 
Similarly in this prayer he bids us remember that, 
imperfect as we are, we forgive one another; much 
more then may we with faith pray that our Heavenly 
Father will forgive us. It is true that he adds, '* If 
ye forgive not men their trespasses neither will your 
Father forgive your trespasses. '^ But this is not 
because the Father will shut his heart up against us 
if we shut up our hearts against one another. It is 
because forgiveness of sin is deliverance from sin 
and the unforgiving soul is not willing to be deliv- 
ered from its relentless hatred. 

The Gospel, then, reduced to its simplest form, 
may be stated thus : God wishes me to be his son. 
Do I wish God to be my Heavenly Father? If 
this is what I really wish, he will take me as I am 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 131 

and make me what he wishes me to be. All that 
he asks is that I should wish to be what he wishes 
me to be. Faith is just the desire to be like God; 
it is reaching out the hand and taking hold of the 
stretched-out hand of God. 

There seem to me to be a great many Christians 
in the church who do not understand this Gospel 
as well as the Hebrew Psalmist did, although he 
wrote some centuries before the life, teaching and 
sacrifice of Jesus Christ had made it clear. Listen 
to him : 

Delight thyself also in Jehovah; 

And he will give thee the desires of thy heart. 

Commit thy way unto Jehovah ; 

Trust also in him, and he will bring it to pass. 

And he will make thy righteousness ta go forth as the 

light, 
And thy justice as the noonday. 

Delight yourself in God. That is all. Want to 
want him; desire to have him; when you read the 
life of Christ say, Yes, that is the kind of life I 
would like to live, that is the kind of man I would 
like to be; Lord, make me like him. That is all, 
absolutely all. 



132 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

I do not know where this truth is more beautifully 
told than in Henry Ward Beecher's graphic descrip- 
tion of his Christian experience. 

I was a child of teaching and prayer; I was reared in 
the household of faith; I knew the Catechism as it was 
taught; I was instructed in the Scriptures as they were 
expounded from the pulpit and read by me; and yet, till 
/after I was twenty-one years old, I groped without the 
I knowledge of God in Christ Jesus. I know not what 
the tablets of eternity have written down, but I think 
that when I stand in Zion and before God, the brightest 
thing I shall look back upon will be that blessed morning 
in May when it pleased God to reveal to my wandering 
soul the idea that it was his nature to love a man in his 
sins for the sake of helping him out of them ; that he did 
not do it out of compliment to Christ, or to a law, or a 
plan of salvation, but from the fullness of his great 
heart, that he was a Being not made mad by sin, but 
sorry, that he was not furious with wrath toward the 
sinner, but pitied him — in short, that he felt toward me 
as my mother felt toward me, to whose eyes my wrong- 
doing brought tears, who never pressed me so close to 
her as when I had done wrong, and who would fain with 
her yearning love lift me out of trouble. And when I 
found that Jesus Christ had such a disposition, and that 
when his disciples did wrong he drew them closer to him 
than he did before — and when pride, and jealousy, and 
rivalry, and all vulgar and worldly feelings rankled in 
their bosoms, he opened his heart to them as a medicine 
to heal these infirmities : when I found that it w^as Christ's 
nature to lift men out of weakness to strength, out of 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 133 

impurity to goodness, out of everything low and debasing 
to superiority, I felt that I had found a God. I shall 
never forget the feelings with which I walked forth that 
May morning. The golden pavements will never feel to 
my feet as then the grass felt to them; and the singing 
of the birds in the woods — for I roamed in the woods 
— was cacophonous to the sweet music of my thoughts; 
and there were no forms in the universe which seemed to 
me graceful enough to represent the Being, a conception 
of whose character had just dawned on my mind. I felt, 
when I had with the Psalmist called upon the heavens, 
the earth, the mountains, the streams, the floods, the birds, 
the beasts, and universal being to praise God, that I had 
called upon nothing that could praise him enough for 
the revelation of such a nature as that in the Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

All this may be true, and yet the past remains. 
God may not remember your sin, but you cannot 
forget it. He may not punish you, but how can 
you escape your own self-punishment? His prom- 
ise may remove your fear of the future, but not 
your sorrow for the past. You shot a poisoned 
arrow into the heart of your wife. You cannot 
draw it out : nor can he. You did a dishonest thing : 
you cannot undo it: nor can he. You can pay 
the money back, but you cannot undo the dishon- 
esty. The past is past: not even God can change it. 



134 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

'' The Moving Finger writes : and having writ 
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, 
Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it." 

That is true. Not even Almighty God can make 
the past other than it is. But God can bring good 
out of our evil, and he often does. John B. Gough 
once said to me, " I never come into a parlor where 
ladies and gentlemen are gathered to meet me with- 
out thinking they are saying to themselves, Here 
comes the man who has twice had delirium tremens ; 
and I never dare to share in a communion service 
where fermented wine is used lest its fragrance 
should prove to me an irresistible temptation." He 
carried the effects of his sin with him to his dying 
day; but he was saved from the sin of drunkenness 
and the very painful memory of his past made him 
all the more effective as an apostle of temperance. 
The greatest single crime of history was perpetrated 
when Judas, Caiphas and Pilate conspired to slay 
the innocent. But out of that conspiracy the 
world's redemption was wrought. 

The history of America illustrates this truth in a 
very striking manner. The Civil War was an awful 



> 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 135 

tragedy, and those who are responsible for bringing 
it on, whether by their ambition, their recklessness, 
their cowardice, or their carelessness, were guilty of 
an awful sin. And yet, on looking back we can see 
now what we could not see then. Before the Civil 
War a great chasm had been opened between the 
North and the South. The union of States was one 
of law, not one of the spirit. The North despised 
the South as a community of braggarts; the South 
despised the North as a community of mere money 
makers. Each said, The other will never fight. 
But the four years of bloody war created in each 
section a respect for the other section not known 
before, and out of a conflict whose wounds we had 
thought could never be healed came forth a fra- 
ternal fellowship which we never knew before. 

The memory of our sins will remain. We shall 
carry it with us even to heaven; but the Apostle 
John tells us that it will add a new song to the 
celestial choral : *' And they sung a new song, say- ( 
ing. Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open 
the seals thereof: for thou wast slain and hast 
redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every 
kindred and tongue and people and nation." They 



136 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

remembered their sins in remembering their redemp- 
tion from sin, as Israel remembered the oppressions 
they had endured in Egypt in remembering their 
deHverance and their Deliverer. In both cases the 
song they sung was a *' New Song." And we need 
not wait for heaven to sing it. 

But it is not only the memories of the past which 
are burdens to us ; the present and the future are 
burdens also. '' We have done the things we ought 
not to have done, and we have left undone the 
things we ought to have done, and there is no health 
in us.'' The evil is still here. And the conscious- 
ness that it is here fills us with apprehension for 
the future. This sense of evil in us, this appre- 
hension of sins into which it will bring us, an appre- 
hension so great as to lead sometimes to despair, 
this is the last and greatest enemy of all. And to 
meet this enemy with courage born of hope, the 
God of the Old Testament and of the New equips us. 

Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as 

snow; 
Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. 

What shall be white Hke snow? The sins. What 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 137 

shall be as wool? The sins. Is this possible? 
Can our sins become virtues? 

It has sometimes been said that there is no good 
in man. It would be truer to say that there is no 
evil in him. For there is nothing in man which is 
inherently evil ; nothing which cannot be directed to 
a good purpose and made to serve a beneficent end. 
Vice is virtue misplaced. Appetite? Is that a 
vice? There are some readers of this book who 
would better eat less than they do; but there are 
others whose doctors wish them to eat more than 
they do. Some have too much appetite, and some 
not appetite enough. Appetite is a virtue; it is the 
misdirection and misuse of appetite which is a vice. 
Approbativeness, is that a sin? A man without 
any care for the opinions of others is a man without 
sympathy ; he cannot understand other men. Pride, 
is that a sin? A man without pride! Such a 
creature is not a man; he has not a vertebrate 
column. Acquisitiveness, is that a sin? Acquisi- 
tiveness, which is a seed of all manner of evil, is 
also a seed of all manner of good. It drives the 
busy wheels of industry and sets us all working. 
What our Father says is this: Not only will I 



138 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

allow no sin you have committed to separate you 
from me; not only will I pluck the evil out of your 
evil doing and make it bring forth good ; but I will 
make the sin in you a virtue if you will let me. 

Moses has been called the meekest man in history. 
But when he brought the Egyptian to the ground 
with a single blow and killed him, I do not believe 
Moses was the meekest man on earth. What is 
meekness? Meekness is passion tamed. And be- 
cause Moses had this power of passion, he had in 
him a power of patience. Patience involves, first of 
all, a power to feel, and secondly, the power to keep 
that feeling in control. Paul, brought up as a 
Pharisee, never, as his letters clearly show, lost his 
pride; but it was so purified, transfigured, inspired 
by a new purpose and directed to a new object that 
what had been a vice became a virtue. It was no 
longer pride in himself and his own righteousness, 
but pride in his Leader and in the Cause to which 
he had consecrated himself. He became a leader* 
of a despised sect and the follower of a convict 
condemned first by a Jewish and then by a Roman 
Tribunal, and put to the most ignoble death known 
to that age. And even in this outcast sect Paul was- 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 139 

looked upon with suspicion by his co-religionists as 
a heretic. But never did he apolgize; never did he 
take a defensive attitude. He gloried in being a 
Jew, gloried in being a Christian Jew, gloried in 
his Convict-Leader, gloried in the cross on which 
that Leader had been put to death. His pride be- 
came an instrument of power and an equipment for 
service. His scarlet sin became white as snow. 

Nor is this transformation of character wrought 
by the spirit of Jesus^Christ merely in the individual : 
it is also social and organic. The great upward and 
forward movements in human history are divinely 
inspired movements ; the Democratic movement, 
the Emancipation movement, the Temperance move- 
ment, the present movement towards international 
justice and peace are all parts of that greater 
movement which we call Christianity. God is 
re-creating the world. 

My realization of the fact that Jesus Christ does 
not promise remission of penalty but does promise 
remission of sin revolutionized my theology because 
it revolutionized my religious experience. Let me 
here in five definitions briefly define that revolution. 

Salvation no longer means to me deliverance from 



140 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Hell and admission to Heaven; it means deliver- 
ance from Sin. Exemption from penalty without 
deliverance from sin would not be salvation. If a 
good man were to go to Hell and retain his good- 
ness he would be saved. If a bad man were to go 
to Heaven and retain his evil nature, he would be 
lost. Heaven must be in us — Hell is in some. 
The Gospel is not the good news that guilty men 
may be saved from punishment, but the good news 
that guilty men may be made virtuous. In one 
word, Salvation is character. 

Justification by faith no longer means to me that 
Christ has suffered the penalties of my sins and 
therefore if I accept his sacrifice God will treat 
me as though I were innocent although I am guilty ; 
it means that Jesus Christ offers himself to me as 
my divine companion and if I accept his compan- 
ionship I can be made virtuous although I have 
been guilty. 

Atonement no longer means to me that Christ has 
made a reparation to God for the wrong I have 
done and therefore God is reconciled to me. It 
means that Christ has by his life and teaching inter- 
preted God to me and by his personal presence 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 141 

inspires in me the will to do my Father's will and 
so has reconciled me to God. 

Regeneration does not mean to me a new faculty 
miraculously given to man by some magic formula, 
as baptism, or by some supernatural experience for 
which man must wait. In every normal man is 
the capacity for goodness and truth, for love and 
service, for hope and joy. But this sleeping capac- 
ity is naught unless it is awakened into life. It is 
a seed, but a lifeless seed until it is given life by a 
divine power above itself. So I might say to the 
seeds in my garden bed. You can never come into 
the kingdom of light and life and beauty until you 
are born from above, and all the while God's sun, 
which shines alike on the evil and the good, is 
waiting to give them life. 

Incarnation means to me more than that the Spirit 
of God dwelt unrecognized by the world centuries 
ago for a few years in Jesus of Nazareth; it also 
means to me that the same Spirit still dwells in the 
world, carrying on now with the followers of Jesus 
the work of serving and saving men which the same 
Spirit carried on with Jesus then. Incarnation to 
me is not merely an historical episode; it is an 



142 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

eternal fact. "Behold I stand at the door and 
knock; if any man will hear my voice and open 
the door I will come unto him and will sup with 
him and he with me/' This figure interprets to 
me the spiritual aspirations of mankind. God is 
love. Where God is, love is. And love is every- 
where: a universal presence, a mighty though not 
resistless power in human life. 

We look back into the past for a memory of a 
God that was, or forward into the future for a hope 
of a God that is to be; and all the while God stands 
at the door and knocks for admission to our lives. 
Love is God knocking. 

Love knocks at the heart of the expectant 
mother, that mother-love may interpret God to her. 
Love knocks at the heart of the boys and girls at 
school and college, that friendship may interpret 
God to them. Love knocks at the heart of the 
youths and the maidens, that a love as strong as 
death, which many waters cannot quench nor floods 
drown, and which is of infinitely more value to 
them than all their possessions, may interpret God 
to them. Love knocks at the door of the mill and 
the mine that by making labor a service love may 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 143 

interpret the spirit of him who is the Maker of 
heaven and earth. Love knocks at the door of 
sorrow, that human sympathy may interpret to the 
mourner him who for our sake became a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief. Love knocks 
at the prison doors, that human forgiveness may 
interpret him who came to seek and to save the lost. 
And love inspires the faith and hope which looks 
up from the hour of death and forward to the 
day of judgment not with dread, but with rejoicing, 
and sings: Let the heavens rejoice and the earth 
be glad, let the sea roar and the fullness thereof, 
the world and they that dwell therein; for Love is 
coming; he is coming to judge the world with 
righteousness and the people with his truth. 

While I was engaged in writing this chapter the 
life of the Reverend Dr. Daniel Bliss was published 
and a copy was sent to me by its author. Dr. Bliss's 
eldest son. Dr. Bliss entered the missionary service 
of the American Board of Commissioners for For- 
eign Missions in 1856 and remained in that service 
until his death in the ninety-third year of his age, 
in 19 1 6. For thirt3''-six years he was the active 
and honored President of the Syrian Protestant 



144 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

College in Beirut, Syria. Toward the end of his 
life he wrote some reminiscences for his children 
and grandchildren. These reminiscences, parts of 
which are included in the life by his son, contain 
the following statement in which he defines with 
characteristic clearness his faith, which both inter- 
prets and confirms the faith which in this chapter I 
have been endeavoring to depict: 

*' Some people have no clear idea in matters of religion 
what IS cause and what is effect. Some seem to think 
that God loves mankind because Christ came and died 
for them Just the opposite is true, for God so loved the 
world that He gave His only Son to us. Some think 
that God loves us because we love Him. The opposite 
is true: we love God because He first loved us. Some 
seem to think that the Atonement made a change in God's 
attitude towards us; God changeth not, and the Atonement 
was made not to change Him but to change us. Some' 
seem to think that God was angry and Christ came to 
reconcile Him; Paul says the opposite is true: God was 
in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.'' 

In his father's biography the son says that his 
father inherited the Calvinistic tradition. Three- 
quarters of a century spent by him in Bible study 
and Christian teaching in Syria and three-quarters 
of a century spent by me in Bible study and Chris- 



TO SEEK AND TO SAVE 145 

tian teaching in America brought us both to sub- 
stantially the same understanding and interpreta- 
tion of the Gospel message. And it is interesting 
to note how in spirit this expression of the father's 
faith tallies with that of a younger son, Howard 
Bliss, for four years my associate in Plymouth 
Church, Brooklyn, and subsequently, and until his 
death in 1920, his father's successor in the College 
Presidency.^ In the interpretation of the Gospel 
furnished in this chapter there is nothing unique. 
It is only the expression of a conviction to w^hich 
many of the most devout and earnest disciples of 
Christ and students of his teaching have been 
coming during the last half century. 

If it is true that Jesus Christ came not to recon- 
cile God to the world but to reconcile the world 
to God, not to redeem men from punishment but to 
redeem them from sin, what is the meaning of his 
sacrifice? Has it any meaning? To a considera- 
tion of that question I devote the next chapter. 
1 See Epilogue at close of the volume. 



CHAPTER IX 

I CAME TO GIVE MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 

No reader will understand this chapter unless he 
has first understood what I have endeavored to 
make clear in the preceding chapter : Salvation is 
not deliverance from punishment but deliverance 
from sin. '' The wages of sin is death : but the 
gift of God is eternal Hfe in Jesus Christ our Lord/' 
'As the sun drives out the darkness by the gift of 
light, as the doctor drives out disease by the gift of 
health, as the teacher drives out ignorance by the 
gift of knowledge, so God drives out sin by the 
gift of his own life. We are saved not by impu- 
tation but by impartation of righteousness; not by 
being treated as though we were innocent when we 
are guilty, but by being made virtuous though we 
were guilty. In the language of Paul, we are '' con- 
formed to the image of God's Son that he may be 
the first born among many brethren.'' 

146 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 147 

The gift of life can never be conferred except 
through self-sacrifice. 

The mother who bore us laid down her Hfe in 
order that she might give a new Hfe to the world. 
I do not suppose that any man can comprehend the 
strange feeling of hope and fear which struggles 
within the awe-struck heart of the expectant mother. 
She goes down to the brink of that mysterious 
stream which is both the river of life and the river 
of death, and knows not whether the ferryman will 
come to carry her away to the unknown land or out 
of the unknowxi land will bring a new life to her. 
When the new born child is laid in her arms her 
travail pain is not over. Just begun is that mother's 
experience, which is at once the greatest fear and 
the greatest hope, the greatest sorrow and the 
greatest joy of human life. Not only in those few 
hours of physical anguish does she suffer; her life 
is one long, joyful self-sacrifice — joyful because 
the greatest joy of life is the joy of self-sacrifice. 
She daily lays down her life for her child. She 
delights in menial services rendered to him which 
she has never before rendered to any one; she 
abandons the society in which market place she 



148 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

was wont to exchange services of good will, and 
devotes herself to the society of the babe who takes 
all and gives nothing. The songs she sings to her 
babe are her only music; her chief literature is the 
stories she reads to the growing child; her most 
enticing games are those she plays with him; her 
most instructive studies are those in which she is 
his leader. She fears nothing so much as that he 
may become estranged from her and from his home 
and fall into vicious habits; she hopes for nothing 
so much as that he may grow up to be gentle and 
strong, just and generous, courageous and wise; and 
she experiences a remorse in his incipient vices far 
greater than any he will ever know, unless in later 
years the memory of her tears comes out of the 
past to teach him. Motherhood is one long travail 
because it is the supremest revelation which human 
experience affords of life-giving, and life-giving is 
always costly to the giver. This it is which makes 
motherhood the most revered of all offices and 
mother the most sacred of all words. 

Next in real honor though not in popular repute 

\ is the teacher. She, too, is a life-giver; she, too, 

knows the travail pain of imparting life. I said 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 149 

once to a famous educator, '^ I should think you 
would get tired of teaching the same lessons year 
after year; what monotony of toil is yours.'* He 
replied, " That is because you are not a teacher, 
Mr. Abbott. An editor is interested in new 
themes; a teacher is interested in new pupils." 
The teacher's problem is as old as the ages and yet 
new with every morning and differs with every 
pupil. It is easy to lead a horse to water, but hard 
to make him drink. If only these boys and girls 
were eager to learn, what a delight it would be to 
teach them. But they are not eager to learn. And 
how to awaken intellectual ambition, concentration 
of effort, steadiness of purpose, is the teacher's 
problem. The chief intellectual quality she needs is 
clearness of expression. The chief moral quality 
she needs is inspired patience. And the much cov- 
eted title of Ph.D. does not certify to either. If 
she have the teacher's ambition, how often as she 
confronts stolid and indifferent faces must she cry 
out. Their ears are dull of hearing and their eyes 
have they closed lest at any time they should hear 
with their ears and see with their eyes and should 
understand with their hearts. How often as she 



ISO WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

sees them discarding her counsels, resenting her 
discipHne and drifting away from her influence 
must she sorrowfully say to herself, I would have 
gathered you together as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings and ye would not! 

I have already indicated in a previous chapter that 
the power and the glory of the Church is in its 
spirit of self-sacrifice: of the Roman Catholic 
Church not in its cathedrals and the jeweled robes 
of its priests, but in the self-sacrificing lives of its 
consecrated sisterhoods; of the Protestant Church 
not in the autocratic Archbishop Laud but in the 
self-sacrificing lives of the persecuted Pilgrims. 
The Church is strong only when it goes out to seek 
and to save that which is lost. The altar in the 
chancel and the cross over it are but symbols. The 
Church is powerful when the spirit which the altar 
and the cross symboHze inspires it to service and 
self-sacrifice. Only a missionary church is a true 
church; only a life-giving church is a living church. 
General Booth in his ever memorable address when 
the Freedom of the City was presented to him by 
the Lord Mayor of London revealed the secret of 
its power: ''The Army has invited the drunkard^. 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 151 

the harlot, the criminal, the pauper, the friendless, 
the giddy, dancing, frivolous throngs, to come and 
seek God." What sacrifice giving that invitation 
involved the story of General Booth's life makes 
evident. 

The spirit of self-sacrifice is the secret of national 
greatness. At this writing (1920) the United 
States is second to no other Nation in its wealth, 
its power, its opportunity for moral leadership. 
What has made it great? Only citizens make a 
Nation great, and only citizens who possess the 
qualities of greatness — service and sacrifice. The 
spirit of self-sacrifice called on the men of 1776, and 
they laid down their Hves to win liberty for them- 
selves and bequeath it to their children. It called 
on the men of 1812, and they laid down their lives 
to win the freedom of the seas for the commerce 
of the world. It called on the men of 1861, and 
they laid down their lives to maintain the life of 
a Nation threatened with destruction and to win 
the emancipation of a race denied the inalienable 
right to liberty. It called on the men of 1898, and 
they laid down their lives to set free a helpless 
neighbor from a sixteenth century oppression. It 



152 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

called on the men of 19 17, and they laid down their 
lives to save their oppressed brothers across the 
sea. Ever since the first Pilgrims set sail from 
Plymouth, it has been calling to their brothers and, 
answering the call, millions of immigrants have 
come hither from other lands; most of them poor, 
many of them illiterate, few of them comprehending 
the nature of the liberty they sought. But we who 
were born freemen cannot easily realize w^hat tears, 
what heart aches, what home-sickness many of these 
who are now our fellow citizens have suffered in 
leaving their homes, their churches, their native land, 
breaking away from all their sacred associations 
and honored traditions, in order that they might 
win for themselves and their children and their 
children's children among strangers in an unknown 
country, freedom, education, a better industrial 
opportunity, a larger life. Theirs, too, has been the 
spirit of self-sacrifice which puts aspiration above 
present possession and the love of others above self- 
love. The glory of America is not in its mines and 
forests, its prairies and water powers, its railways 
and sky-scrapers, but in its Valley Forge, its Gettys- 
burg, its San Juan Hill, its Chateau-Thierry, its 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 153 

too little honored immigrant population, and in its 
churches, its schools, and its colleges, built and 
maintained by the spirit of self-sacrifice. 

Henry Drummond has shown in his discerning 
volume, '^ The Ascent of Man," that this life of 
self-sacrifice is discernible throughout the drama of 
creation daily enacted before our eyes, from the 
division of the cell in the very beginnings of life 
to the highest ministrations of self-sacrificing love 
in motherhood. '' There are,'' he writes, '' two 
Struggles for Life in every living thing; the 
Struggle for Life and the Struggle for the Life of 
Others.'' And again: ^^ The Creation is a drama, 
and no drama was ever put upon the stage with 
only one actor. The Struggle for Life is the ' Vil- 
lain ' of the piece, no more; and, like the ' Villain ' 
in the play, its chief fimction is to re-act upon the 
other players for higher ends. There is, in point 
of fact, a second factor which one might venture to 
call the Struggle for the Life of Others, which plays 
an equally prominent part. Even in the early 
stages of development, its contribution is as real, 
while in the world's later progress — under the 
name of Altruism — it assumes a sovereignty 



154 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

before which the earlier Struggle sinks into insig- 
nificance." And still again : '' The first chapter or 
two of the Story of Evolution may be headed the 
Struggle for Life, but take the book as a whole 
and it is not a tale of battle. It is a Love story." 
That sacrifice is the law of nature is recognized 
by such purely scientific and avowedly unreligious 
writers as Darwin and Haeckel; but nowhere I 
think is it more beautifully portrayed and scien- 
tifically demonstrated than in this volume of Henry 
Drummond, from which I must content myself 
with one more quotation in which the truth is 
interpreted with equal scientific clearness and 
spiritual beauty. 

To interpret the course of Evolution without this [law 
of sacrifice] would be to leave the richest side even of 
material Nature without an explanation. Retrace the 
ground even thus hastily travelled over, and see how full 
Creation is of meaning, of anticipation, of good for man, 
how far back begins the undertone of Love. Remember 
that nearly all the beauty of the world is Love-Beauty — 
the corolla of the flower and the plume of the grass, the 
lamp of the firefly, the plumage of the bird, the horn 
of the stag, the face of a woman; that nearly all the 
music of the natural world is Love-Music — the song of 
the nightingale, the call of the mammal, the chorus of 
the insect, the serenade of the lover; that nearly all the 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 153 

foods of the world are Love-foods — the date and the 
raisin, the banana and the bread-fruit, the locust and the 
honey, the eggs, the grains, the seeds, the cereals, and the 
legumes; that all the drinks of the world are Love-drinks 
— the juice of the sprouting grain and the withered hop, 
the milk from the udder of the cow, the wine from the 
Love-cup of the vine. Remember that the Family, the 
crown of all higher life, is the creation of Love; that Co- 
operation, which means power, which means wealth, which 
means leisure, which therefore means art and culture, 
recreation and education, is the gift of Love. Remember 
not only these things, but the diffusions of feeling which 
accompany them, the elevations, the ideals, the happiness, 
the goodness, and the faith in more goodness, and ask 
if it is not a w^orld of Love in which we live.^ 

Truly does Drummond say that " Literally, scien- 
tifically, Love is life.'' Myriad are the voices with 
which nature proclaims that God is Love and that 
Love can give life only through sufifering and self- 
sacrifice. Science confirms what the heart of man 
has desired to believe. Love and sacrifice — the 
Struggle for Others — is the law of human nature 
because it is the law of God's own nature. His own 
spirit, the spirit of love, service and sacrifice, he 
breathed into man in the dawn of creation, and 
still breathes into every child of man who is 

1 Henry Drummond : " The Ascent of Man," page 232. 



IS6 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

brought into the world. As the. mother can give 
Hfe to the child, the saint to the church, the patriot 
to the nation, the nation to the world, and nature 
to her great progeny, so God can give his life to 
his children only by sacrifice. 

The pagans offered sacrifices to appease the wrath 
of angry gods or win the favor of corruptible gods; 
the Israelites offered sacrifices, to satisfy the law 
of a just God or to express their thanks for the 
goodness of a merciful God. Both offered sacri- 
fices by or on behalf of men to God or the gods. 
The Glad Tidings of Jesus Christ is that sacrifice 
for sin is offered not by man to God but God to 
man; it is not an act of man to procure forgive- 
ness but an act of God conferring forgiveness. 
God brings the gift into the temple and man comes 
empty-handed. The rich One brings his wealth to 
the poor; the wise One brings his wisdom to the 
ignorant; the strong One brings his strength to the 
weak; the living One brings his Hfe to the dead. 

The New Testament writers present this truth 
in many different ways. 

Sometimes in argument with the Jews, as in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews: there is no longer need 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 157 

of a Temple, for man is the Temple and God dwells 
in him; there is no longer need of a sacrifice, for 
God's Son is the sacrifice. 

Sometimes in a figure: the Lamb of God taketh 
away the sins of the world; the Lamb is one which 
God provides, man has not to provide one. 

Sometimes in explicit terms : Hereby know we 
love because he laid down his life for us; and we 
ought to lay dow^n our lives for the brethren. 

Sometimes as God's unspeakable gift to the 
world: God so loved the world that he gave his 
only begotten Son. 

Sometimes as the revelation in a divinely en- 
dowed human life of what God is and what we 
ought to be : Have this mind in you, which was 
also in Christ Jesus : who, existing in the form of 
God, counted not the being on an equality with 
God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, 
taking the form of a servant, being made in the 
likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a 
man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even 
unto death, yea, the death of the cross. 

Sometimes by a figure often used in Christian 
literature but often misunderstood and misinter- 



iS8 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

preted. '^ The life of the flesh," said the Jewish 
law, '' is in the blood." This use of blood to 
signify the vital principle, the life, the temper of 
mind, the natural disposition, the inherited quality 
or character is very common in English literature 
and ought to have saved us from misunderstanding 
it as used in the Bible. ^^ The blood of Christ,'' 
says Stanley, "means the inmost essence of his 
character." ^ Substitute the words "' deliverance 
from sin " for *' forgiveness of sin " and " life 
poured out " for '' blood shed " and texts which 
have often been emptied of their meaning become 
vital again. 

This is the New Covenant in my life poured out 
for many for their deliverance from sin. 

Except a man imbibe my spirit of life he cannot 
be my disciple. 

The spirit of Christ's life cleanseth us from all 
sin. 

Without the imparting 'Of life there can be no 
deliverance from sin. 

1 See Dean Stanley's Essay on " The Body and the Blood " 
in his ^* Christian Institutions/' See also the illustrations of 
this customary use of blood in English literature given by the 
Century Dictionary. 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 159 

We are saved not by the drops of blood which 
trickled down from Christ's hands and feet, not by 
the blood and water that flowed after his death 
from Christ's pierced side; but by the life which 
that blood symbolized; the life given from his early 
boyhood to his death; the life still given by him 
in every self-sacrificing service of mother to her 
children, of every Christian worker to his church, 
of every patriotic citizen to his country, of the 
loyal soldier laying down his life on the field of 
battle. Every aspiration to a life of love, service 
and sacrifice, however it may seem to come, repeats 
the call of the Apostle — " I beseech you by the 
mercies of God that you present your bodies a living 
sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your 
reasonable service." 

It was not by his death that Christ saved the 
world, but by laying down his life for the world — 
by his death only as that was an inevitable conse- 
quence of the completeness of his consecration to 
his Father's will. Passion week began when he was 
born ; yea, when in the counsels of eternity he said, 
I will go down into that suffering, sin-stricken world 
and will lay down my life for it. From the be- 



i6o WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

ginning to the end his Hfe was laid down for hu- 
manity. Laid down as truly when he went into 
the wilderness and wrestled with the tempter; as 
truly when he went into the courts of Jerusalem 
and scourged out the traders, knowing what hos- 
tility he was arousing ; as truly when he set his face 
steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, where his enemies 
were, and his disciples followed amazed and won- 
der-stricken that he should go thither; as truly 
when he knew the plot that Judas was making for 
his destruction and refused to flee; as truly when 
he faced the mob in the Temple courts in Jerusalem 
and told the Hebrews to their face that they were 
traitors to their God and to their native land — as 
truly then as when in the court of Pilate he said, 
'' I am a king," and when in the court of Caiaphas 
he said, " I am the Son of God," and walked out 
bearing his cross to be nailed upon it. And in all 
this he was interpreting the life of God in his 
world; the life of a Father who always has com- 
passion on his children, always goes out to seek 
and to save them, always shares their sorrows and 
their sins. 

Tersely and very beautifully and very clearly has 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY i6i 

Sir Oliver Lodge put this truth, this revelation of 
the nature and perpetual sacrifice of God through 
the Hfe and passion of Jesus Christ, in what is, I 
think, the briefest Hfe of Jesus in literature, but 
not the least significant : 

Undoubtedly the Christian idea of God is the simpie 
one. Overpoweringly and appallingly simple is the notion 
presented to us by the orthodox Christian churches: — A 
babe born of poor parents, born in a stable among cattle 
because there was no room for them in the village inn 
— no room for them in the inn — what a master touch ! 
Revealed to shepherds. Religious people inattentive. 
Royalty ignorant, or bent on massacre. . . . Then the 
child growing into a peasant youth, brought up to a trade. 
At length a few years of itinerant preaching; flashes of 
miraculous power and insight. And then a swift end: 
set upon by the religious people; his followers over-awed 
and scattered, himself tried as a blasphemer, flogged, and 
finally tortured to death. Simplicity most thorough and 
most strange I In itself it is not unique; such occurrences 
seem inevitable to highest humanity in an unregenerate 
world; but who, without inspiration would see in them a 
revelation of the nature of God?^ 

Jesus Christ came to a Nation in which for 
centuries religion had found two not always con- 
sistent interpretations — one priestly, the other 
1 Sir Oliver Lodge : ** Raymond,'* p. 381. 



i62 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

prophetic. The priestly conception centered around 
^ and was expressed by an elaborate sacrificial system 
whose temple ran red with the blood of slaughtered 
cattle/ This priestly conception Jesus Christ never 
approved by word or act. He frequently promised 
forgiveness of sin, but never suggested that the 
'penitent should offer a sacrifice to insure the for- 
giveness or complete the penitence. He told his 
disciples that he must himself suffer for sinful 
humanity, that he must give himself a ransom for 
many, that he must bear the cross and be borne 
upon it; but he also told them that by so doing 
he would show forth the glory of his Heavenly 
Father. His suffering love Christ never inter- 
preted as man's offering to God; but always as 
God's offering to man. Man does not in his deep 
abasement offer sacrifice to appease God's wrath; 
God in his infinite love offers sacrifice to purify 
man and to impart life to him. 

Christ's instructions to his disciples are equally 

1 In ** The Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews " I 
have indicated more fully the conflict between these two con- 
ceptions of religion and traced very briefly the way in which 
the priestly conception was borrowed from paganism and 
grafted upon Judaism. 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 163 

inconsistent with the notion that pardon is to be 
purchased by sacrifice. He bade his disciples 
forgive their enemies as their Father forgives them, 
a counsel which would require us to ask a sacrifice j 
of every one that wrongs us, if the Father asks a/ 
sacrifice by us or on our behalf as a condition of! 
his forgiveness. Christ told a story once which 
makes this paralleHsm perfectly clear. A lord had 
a servant who owed him one hundred talents and 
when he had nothing to pay, freely forgave him the \ 
debt. But this servant went out and cast into I 
prison a fellow servant who owed him one hundred / 
pence. And his lord was wroth with him for 
treating his fellow servant with such inconsistent 
inhumanity. The ground of Christ's appeal to his 
disciples to forgive freely those that have wronged 
them is the fact that the Heavenly Father freely 
forgives them that have sinned against him. In 
neither case is the payment of the unpayable debt 
to be demanded. 

Is there then no sacrifice ? Surely there is a 
sacrifice ; but by God to man, not by man to God. 

It has been said that in the parable of the Prodigal 
Son there is no hint of sacrifice. Is this true? 



3 a \ 
1. / 



i64 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 



V 



"here is no hint of any sacrifice by man to God. 
/\ The father in the parable does not wait to be 
/ entreated, nor to have his wrath appeased, nor to 
I have his justice satisfied, nor to have the debt of 
/ the sinful son paid by or for him. But the suffering 
of God for his sinful children is clearly and vividly 
portrayed. The father had mourned his son as 
lost, and behold he is found; he had mourned his 
son as dead, and behold there is in his repentance 
the sign of a dawning life. The father had com- 
passion on him, that is, suffered with him. And 
while the son still held himself afar off, ashamed 
to go on ^ but reluctant to turn back, the father 
went out to welcome him. The son suffered the 
shame of his own sin. The father suffered the 
shame of his son's/^in. This common experience 
brought them together. If the son had not felt 
ashamed of his sin nqjove of the father could have 
made the son a sharer in his father's Hfe. If the 
father had not felt the shame of his son's sin, if he 
had dismissed it lightly and carelessly as a '' sowing 
of wild oats,'' the son could not have shared his 
father's life. But when the son and the father 
share in a common sorrow, when repentance and 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 163 

sacrifice meet, a life in common begins; the fatal 
separation between the father and his child is ended ; 
they are at one; at-one-ment is made. 

The only sacrifice Christisunity knows is self- 
sacrifice; and self-sacrifice is the glory of God and 
the power of God. 

From the time of Christ the sacrifice in the 
Jewish temxple ceases. The Christian temple courts 
are not reddened with the blood of victims. Sacri- 
fices are no longer offered to God; the sacrifice of 
the Son of God is accepted by man. The passion 
and death of Christ are the witness of a love deep, 
tender, true, eternal, in the heart of the Father, 
the source of all love, causing all love; but itself 
uncaused. The culmination of the long spiritual 
development issues in the declaration, " Herein is 
love, not that we loved God, but that he first loved 
us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins." He is not to be propitiated; he propitiates 
himself. He satisfies his justice by his own 
redeeming love. The life, suffering and death of 
Christ are not to enable God to be a justifier, not- 
withstanding he is just, but to show that his is a 
justice which does justify, a righteousness which 



i66 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

Tightens, a nature which, because he cannot brook 
unrighteousness, suffers the shame of it as though 
it were his own, until by his suffering love he has 
entered even callous and indifferent hearts and 
filled them with his Spirit. 

Is this to say that sin is a light matter, easily 
overcome, of small consequence, with little ill dessert 
and little evil consequence? On the contrary, sin 
not only fills to the brim with suffering the cup of 
him who indulges in it, not only presses a cup of 
even greater bitterness to the lips of every loving 
and Christlike soul who longs and strives to deliver 
his brother from the poisoned chalice, but it brings 
suffering upon the heart of the infinite and loving 
God, who is himself able to save his children from 
their own self-destruction only by his own suffering 
of their self-inflicted penalty. This is the Gospel. 
And history proves it a far more effective message 
for the redemption of mankind than any message 
of law and penalty, however qualified and amelio- 
rated by a message of mercy purchased only by 
sacrifice offered by the sinner or on his behalf to an 
angry God, hard to be entreated. 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 167 

Let me try to make this clear by a simple illus- 
tration. 

A young girl grows up in culture and refinement. 
She is surrounded in her home by every conceivable 
comfort. The air she breathy is as pure as the 
air that blows from Mont Blanc. But she reads the 
story of sin and degradation in the East Side of 
New York, and it fills her with bitter sorrow. It / 
is a terrible thing, she says, that men and women / 
should be living such lives as these. Will you 
satisfy her by saying that they will suffer for it? 
Will you satisfy her by saying, Let the drunkard 
alone, and he will have poverty and disease and 
hunger and every form of wretchedness? Let self- 
ishness alone and it will embitter the lives of all ' 
selfish people. Let malice alone and they that are 
living in malice will pay the natural penalty of 
their iniquity. Will that satisfy her? No! She 
will reply. That is what troubles me. I want to 
cure, not to punish. Justice does not satisfy love, 
never can satisfy love. She leaves her home — the 
physical luxury, the pure atmosphere, the congenial 
companionship — goes over to the East Side, takes 



i68 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

a room, lives there with a single companion, and 
gives herself to the work of cleansing where there 
is filth, redeeming where there is vice, bringing love 
in where there was hate. Go and look at her. 
Her face shines with a glory that was never there 
before. If you could see into her heart, you would 
see there a joy inspiring her that she never knew 
before. She has propitiated_herself by her own 
forgiving sacrifice. Her love is satisfying her. 
All propitiation is self -propitiation. One person 
can never satisfy another. There is no wrath of 
God to be appeased by human sacrifice; none that 
can be satisfied by natural penalty. The flames of 
hell never could burn out the wrath of God. It 
will be burned out by the fire of his own infinite 
love. 

The sacrifice goes not forth from man to God 
to win his mercy, but from God to man to win 
him back to life. And it goes from man to man if 
the spirit of God, that is, the spirit of love, service 
and sacrifice is in man. What does Christ mean 
when he says that we are to take up our cross and 
follow him? What does Paul mean when he says 



MY LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY 169 

we must fill up that which is lacking in the suffer- 
ings of Christ by our own suffering? Is the 
wrath of God not yet appeased? Does he still hold 
his anger, despite all these generations of tears, 
suffering, pain, agony, and all the agony on Geth- 
semane and the blood upon the cross? Must you 
and I still suffer in order to appease the wrath of a 
still angry God ? Surely not. To take up Christ's 
cross and follow him is to share with him in offer- 
ing the sacrifice of love to sinful humanity, to whom 
love must still offer its sacrifice until sin is no 
more. 

If I could paint the shadow of the cross, I would 
not paint it as the shadow of a yawning boy cast 
on the wall betokening his weariness of the task 
which has been set him to perform. Have you not 
seen the mother with her arms outstretched and 
the little child drawn by this silent invitation of her 
welcoming love, run quickly to her that the mother's 
arms might clasp him to her bosom. I would paint 
the shadow of that mother's love upon the wall; 
for God's love reaches out to lay hold upon the 
weakest, the poorest, the most sinful of his children. 



170 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

and the cross of Christ is the shadow thrown upon 
the earth of the Father^s inviting and welcoming 
love. 

The glory of Christ is not the triumphal entrance 
into Jerusalem but the funeral procession from 
Jerusalem to Calvary. And the glory of Chris- 
tianity is in the lives of love, service and sacrifice 
of the unnumbered millions who, following their 
Leader, have laid down their lives and are laying 
down their lives for their brethren. Christ's cross 
is the throne of God. The crown which He 
bestows upon his faithful followers is the crown of 
thorns — the self-sacrifice of a life-giving love. 



CHAPTER X 

THY KINGDOM' COME ON EARTH 

In all that Jesus said and did — inspiring a new 
philanthropy, imparting the life of the spirit, curing 
the sin-sick, laying down his life in ceaseless serv- 
ice and self-sacrifice, — he was fulfilling the mission 
which his Father had entrusted to him. 

He began his ministry as a herald preaching to 
an expectant people. The Kingdom of Heaven is at 
hand. He ended it by testifying under oath to the 
Sandhedrin that he was the long-hoped for Deliv- 
erer and declaring to Pilate that he was a King 
whose empire and whose arms were truth. To that 
mission he devoted himself in life; for that mission 
he surrendered himself to death; that mission he 
passed on to his followers; and the hope that the 
Kingdom of God might come on earth which dom- 
inated his life and sustained him in death he be- 
queathed to them to be their prayer and their life 
purpose. 

171 



172 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

What did he mean by the Kingdom of God? 

From the very beginning of their history as a 
Nation, the Jews had been taught by their prophets 
to look forward to a Golden Age when Israel should 
be a world ruler, all peoples, nations and languages 
should serve him, and under his just and beneficent 
rule poverty, ignorance, oppression and wars should 
cease. These prophecies are often obscure and 
sometimes seemingly contradictory. Sometimes 
this Kingdom is to be brought in by a King in his 
glory, sometimes by a Sufferer who will be despised 
and rejected of men, sometimes by Israel embodied 
in a divine leader, sometimes by the Nation whom 
the prophet personifies as itself a Leader. This is 
not strange. We mistake if we imagine that the 
object of prophecy is to give accurate information 
of future events. This the prophets have never suc- 
ceeded in doing, probably never endeavored to do. 
They were poets; they were not anticipating his- 
torians. They spoke words of hope to inspire to 
courage and words of warning to admonish to cau- 
tion; and their words were not less effectual because 
both the promises and the warnings were often ill- 
defined and imperfectly understood. In the first 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 173 

century the spirit of prophecy was dead in Israel, 
scribes had taken the place of prophets. The peo- 
ple, illy instructed by these *' blind leaders of the 
blind '' interpreted literally the prophecies which 
pleased them and ignored the others. This has been 
the custom of literalists in all ages. 

They were familiar with world empires. At suc- 
cessive epochs Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon 
Greece, had ruled the world. At that time Rome 
was ruler of the world. It was easy to believe that 
Israel's turn would come, that the gods of the pagan 
would disappear, that Jehovah would take their 
place, that Rome would fall into ruins and Jerusa- 
lem would become the world capital, that the 
prophecy of Daniel would be fulfilled and the great- 
ness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven would 
be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. 
Doubtless the national ideal was both vague and 
contradictory. National ideals always are vague 
and contradictory. In America to-day the ideal of 
some is material prosperity, of others educational 
development, of still others spiritual richness of life. 
As now, so then. The Kingdom of God meant pros- 
perity and happiness and also righteousness and 



174 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

peace. Some put emphasis on prosperity, others on 
righteousness. But they all agreed upon at least 
two points: that Israel would rule the world; and 
that her rule would be given to her by Jehovah as 
a sudden and splendid gift. '' The idea of a gradual 
and regular progress upon earth was totally unknown 
to them. They, on the contrary, were now familiar 
with, and found no objection to, ideas of sudden or 
catastrophic change. In fact they usually thought 
that the Golden Age would (by divine intervention) 
immediately succeed an age of violence and wicked- 
ness; the worst would be immediately followed by 
the best." They believed '' that God could and 
would suddenly, and one might almost say violently, 
create a new world, not through human cooperation, 
not through human achievement, but by His own 
power, His own will. His own goodness, and for 
His own sake and glory as much as for the sake and 
glory of Israel.'' ^ 

In his first recorded sermon, preached in the syna- 

iQ G. Montefiore: "Outlines of Liberal Judaism," p. 151. 
"Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus," 1910, 
p. 64. This interpretation by a liberal and scholarly modern 
Jewish teacher cannot be suspected of Christian prejudice 
against the Jewish conception of the Kingdom of God. In 
fact Dr. Montefiore thinks Jesus shared that conception. 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 175 

gogue of the village of Nazareth, the home of his 
youth, Jesus took for his text a passage from one of 
the ancient prophets foretelling the Golden Age. He 
declared that the fulfillment of these prophecies was 
at hand. He was heard at first with delight. But 
when he went on to say that Jehovah was God of 
the Gentiles as well as of the Jews, and took two in- 
stances from the Old Testament history to illus- 
trate the truth that God is no respecter of races as 
he is no respecter of persons, the wrath of his hear- 
ers knew no bounds, the worshipping congregation 
w^as transformed into a mob, and he would have been 
slain on the spot had he not with that mysterious 
magnetic power, of which history affords other like 
examples, awed the crowd and passed through their 
midst unharmed. Never thereafter in public dis- 
course did he attempt to define in unmistakable 
terms his interpretation of the coming Kingdom. 
His teaching concerning it was disguised in parables 
— purposely disguised. If it were stated plainly 
the people would have none of it. To stories they 
would listen, and afterwards, thinking them over 
and discussing them among themselves, they might 
come to some glimmerings of the truth. When oc- 



176 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

casionally he disclosed to his immediate friends his 
mission he cautioned them to tell no one; to tell 
would close the only door of access to the people 
which was open to him and would do not good but 
harm. When toward the end of his Hfe his hearers 
caught his meaning the effect was to fan the smoking 
prejudice of the ecclesiastical party into a hot flame 
of anger. When in a sermon of some length he ex- 
plained to the people of Galilee, where his friends 
were mostly to be found, that the Kingdom of God 
could come only to a people who shared his spirit of 
service and self-sacrifice, so many of his former dis- 
ciples abandoned him that he turned sadly to his 
twelve intimate friends with the question " Will ye 
also go away ? '^ 

Matthew has collected in one chapter of his narra- 
tive several of these parables of the Kingdom. Add- 
ing to them one reported by Mark but not by Mat- 
thew, and guided by his own interpretation to the 
Twelve of several of these parables, we may sum- 
marize Jesus' interpretation of the Kingdom of God 
as follows: 

It will not come suddenly nor violently; it will not 
come as a divine gift without human cooperation, 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 177 

nor by a catastrophic change. It will grow up like 
a seed planted in the ground. As the earth bears 
fruit of itself and we know not why nor how, so this 
kingdom will grow up by spiritual forces within 
men, — a growth not a gift, or, rather, a gift that is 
a growth, but brought forth from men not imposed 
upon them. Its growth therefore will depend upon 
the nature of the individuals and of the races to 
whom the truth of God comes. Evil will grow as 
well as good; men will wonder whence the evil 
comes, and why, and whether the world is growing 
worse or better. The beginnings of the Kingdom 
will be insignificant; but it will grow to be a shade, 
a shelter, a bearer of fruit, a nesting place, a home 
of abundant life. It will be like yeast, a source of 
agitation. It will be costly, — all that a man hath 
he must be willing to give that he may possess it. 

Other parables add other aspects of Jesus' teach- 
ing concerning the Kingdom. Often God will seem 
like an absentee landlord ; men will be thrown upon 
their own resources, will be left to their own de- 
vices ; trusted that they may be tried. In this King- 
dom men are judged by their practice not by their 
profession. Of two sons, the one who promises his 



178 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

father to do the task allotted to him and does noth- 
ing Is rejected; the son who declines the task and 
then engages in it is accepted. The Kingdom is for 
all sorts and conditions of men, for Jew and Gentile, 
for good, bad and indifferent. It is like a feast to 
which the lame, the halt, and the blind are invited. 
It is a present life, not a something postponed to a 
future age. All things are now ready. It is among 
you.^ It can he had by any one who wishes it. The 
only condition is loyalty. It is not a place but an 
attitude of mind, a course of conduct — in a word, 
a life. The separation between those in the King- 
dom and those without it is invisible, as invisible as 
that between the loyal and the disloyal citizen of 
America. But it is an infinite gulf — as deep as 
hell, as broad as eternity. Two women are in the 
same. social company : one is In the Kingdom of God, 
the other In the kingdom of fashion. Two mer- 
chants are in the same store : one is in the Kingdom 
of God, the other in the kingdom of greed. Two 
lawyers are in the same court room: one is in the 
Kingdom of God, the other in the kingdom of am- 

1 Or within you ; either translation is possible, and there is 
really no practicable difference between the two interpreta- 
tions. 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 179 

bition. Two statesmen are in the same legislative 
chambers : one is in the Kingdom of God, the other 
in the kingdom of party policy. Two ministers are 
in the same ecclesiastical assembly: one is in the 
Kingdom of God, the other in the kingdom of false 
pretense. Everywhere there are sitting side by 
side in the same room, breathing the same air, tak- 
ing part in the same activities, Paul and Agrippa, 
John and Judas, Christ and Caiaphas. 

As the gulf, which separates the Kingdom of God 
from the Kingdom of the world is invisible, so is 
the mystic bond which unites in one great brother- 
hood the citizens of the Kingdom of God. In this 
Kingdom whose only law is love — doing justly, 
loving mercy, and walking in reverent and affection- 
ate companionship with the All-Father, we its citi- 
zens, are united by a common purpose to make life 
worth living and this world a happier because a bet- 
ter world to live in ; and by a common hope, an as- 
surance that we shall succeed, because we are not 
only engaged in our Father's business but are work- 
ing in his companionship and under the Leader 
whom he has given to us. In the eighteenth century 
Christians regarded themselves as pupils preparing 



i8o WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

for a better world ; in the twentieth century they re- 
gard themselves as architects and builders engaged 
in making a better world. There is truth in both 
conceptions; but the latter appears to me more in 
accord with the teaching and life of the Master. 
Our school is a practice school ; an ambition both to 
acquire and show proficiency by practice inspires our 
energies and rules our life. 

Out of this Kingdom have grown churches with 
their creeds, philanthropies with their constitutions, 
schools and colleges with their staffs of officials. 
But the Kingdom has neither creed, nor constitution, 
nor officials. Church history informs us that the 
creeds have been made for the purpose, not of in- 
cluding all Christlike spirits, but of excluding all 
of unorthodox opinions. When we meet in church 
assemblies to consider plans for Christian unity, the 
schemes proposed generally include acceptance of 
the same creed, the same sacraments and the same 
form of church organization. The process is dis- 
appointingly slow, the results disappointingly inef- 
fective. But when we cease talking about union 
and engage in practical work, we find ourselves sur- 
prisingly at one. Where is the Protestant who 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH i8i 

does not honor the Christlike courage of the Roman 
Catholic Cardinal Mercier in his single-handed de- 
fense of Belgium against the brigands who had over- 
run it? Where is the Churchman who does not 
honor the self-devotion of the Quaker Herbert 
Hoover to his task of administering the charities of 
a united humanity in feeding the starving millions 
of devastated and plague-stricken Europe? While 
we have been discussing theological plans for adopt- 
ing some common symbols, behold, without a plan, 
our work for our fellow men has united us in a Red 
Cross Society and we have hung the symbol of love, 
service and sacrifice in the windows of Roman Cath- 
olics, Protestants, Jews and Agnostics. 

Nor is it only in work we are united but also 
in our worship. ^' Theologians," wrote William 
Wordsworth to his friend, ^' may puzzle their heads 
about dogmas as they will, the religion of gratitude 
cannot mislead us. Of that we are sure, and grati- 
tude is the handmaid to hope and hope the harbinger 
of faith.'' We may look in the creeds for conflict- 
ing opinions; but it is in our hymn books we must 
look for the experience of our faith and hope and 
love. When in 1850 Henry Ward Beecher pub- 



i82 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

lished the Plymouth Collection, he was sharply 
criticized by religious journals for including in it 
hymns by Roman Catholic and Unitarian singers. 
But now we invite to lead us in our worship The 
Calvinistic Toplady, in '* Rock of Ages cleft for me/' 
the Methodist Charles Wesley, in " Jesus Lover of 
my soul/' the Roman Catholic Cardinal Newman in 
*'Lead, Kindly Light/' the Quaker Whittier in 
" Dfear Lord and Father of Mankind/' and the Uni- 
tarian Miss Adams in " Nearer, My God, to thee." 
As both the boundaries of this kingdom and the 
bonds which unite its citizens in one great Brother- 
hood are invisible, so is the law which governs it. 
It is not engraven on stone nor written on parch- 
ment. The Ten Commandments are not laws issued 
by a King to which the citizens are subject ; they are 
interpretations of laws wrought in man's nature by 
the Creator. The laws of health are the laws of 
God because the body is the creation of God. Simi- 
larly the spiritual laws are n the laws of God because 
they are the laws of his own being, and he is the 
Father of our spirits and we inherit from him his 
nature. What we call the moral laws are as truly 
natural as are the laws of light, heat, electricity and 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 183 

gravitation. The difference is that man can violate 
the laws of God, material nature cannot violate 
them. As the eye is made for seeing and the ear for 
hearing and the lungs for breathing, so the mind is 
made to perceive and apprehend truth and the con- 
science to perceive and appreciate right and v^rong 
and the affections to hate that which is evil and love 
that which is good. Paul's counsel, ^' Abhor that 
which is evil, cleave to that which is good,'' is an in- 
terpretation to man of his own divine nature. De- 
pravity is not natural; it is, as Bushnell has said, 
contra-natural. The non-theological man recog- 
nizes this truth and calls the mother who deserts her 
child an '^ unnatural " mother. 

To Paganism God was a King ; but Jesus told his 
disciples, '' When ye pray say Our Father." One 
difference between a king and a father is this: the 
king issues laws and demands of his subjects obedi- 
ence — nothing more. The father also demands 
nothing more ; but he wants more. He wants to be 
his child's ideal and the object of his child's reverenc- 
ing love. The father needs the child no less than 
the child needs the father. The child needs some 
one to care for him; the father needs some one to 



i84 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

care for; the child needs some one to love him; the 
father needs some one to love. Our needs make us 
dear to God. Therefore it is that Jesus sums up all 
the laws of the Kingdom in the saying, " Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with 
all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor 
as thyself." 

Because the laws of God are the laws of our own 
nature, because his commands are only calls to us to 
live normal, natural lives, the kind of lives for which 
we are fitted, his Kingdom is a free Commonwealth. 
It has been well called by a modern scholar " The 
Republic of God.'' To live divinely is to live freely. 
The commandments of God are not restraints on our 
liberty but inspirations to liberty, for they are inter- 
pretations to us of our own true nature, and ideals 
of what we can become. If we are true to ourselves 
we shall be true to God, for we are his offspring. 

Into these few pages I have tried to condense 
the experience of a lifetime. Into a few lino^ I 
here endeavor to condense the message of these 
pages. 

Christianity means to me : 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 185 

A new spirit of love service and sacrifice in hu- 
manity. 

A new and ever developing life in art, literature, 
music, philosophy, government, industr}^, worship. 

A relief from the heavy burden of remorse for 
past errors, blunders, and sins. 

An ever growing aspiration for the future and an 
ever increasing power toward achievement. 

Faith in ourselves and in our fellow men ; in our 
infinite possibilities because in our infinite inherit- 
ance. 

Faith in the great enterprise in which God's loyal 
children are engaged, that of making a new world 
out of this old world, a faith which failure does not 
discourage nor death destroy. 

Faith in a Leader who both sets us our task and 
shares it with us ; the longer we follow him and work 
with him, the more worthy to be loved, trusted and 
followed does he seem to us to be. 

Faith in a companionable God whom we cannot 
understand, still less define, but with whom we can 
be acquainted, as a little child is acquainted with his 
mysterious mother. 

Faith in our present possession of a deathless life 



i86 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

of the spirit, which we share with the Father of 6ur 
spirits and our divinely appreciated leader. 

The autobiography of the unknown author of the 
one hundred and third psalm is the story of our past 
experience : 

Bless the Lord, O my soul, 

And forget not all his benefits : 

Who f orgiveth all thine iniquities ; 

Who healeth all thy diseases ; 

Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; 

Who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender 

mercies-; 
Who satisfieth thine age with good ; 
So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle. 

The prayer of the apostle to the Gentiles is the 
expression of our hope for the future : 

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, 
from whom every family in heaven and on earth is 
named, that he will grant you according to the riches 
of his glory, to be strengthened with might, by his 
Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in 
your hearts by faith, that ye being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with 



THY KINGDOM COME ON EARTH 187 



all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, 
and height; and to know the love of Christ, which 
passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all 
the fullness of God. 



EPILOGUE 

Howard S. Bliss was associated with me in the 
pastorate of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, for four 
years. Then, after a successful independent pas- 
torate in New Jersey, he accepted a call to become 
the successor of his father, the Reverend Daniel 
Bliss, as President of the Syrian Protestant College 
at Beirut, Syria. During the Great War (1914- 
191 8) he preserved the College despite the machina- 
tions of astute and powerful foes, and maintained 
peace within the College between students who 
belonged to the races and shared the religious faiths 
of those who were grappling in deadly strife with- 
out. Then, his task accomplished, he came home to 
die. Eager student, loyal friend, chivalric soldier, 
patriotic American, devoted Christian, his last mes- 
sage to his generation was an article in the Atlantic 
Monthly published a few weeks before his death. 
From this, the culmination of his great career, I 
quote the following sentences which I would gladly 
make the culmination of my life's teaching: 

188 



EPILOGUE 189 

Does Christ save you from your sin? 
Call Him Savior ! 

Does He free you from the slavery of your 
passions ? 

Call Him Redeemer! 

Does He teach you as no one else has taught you ? 
Call Him Teacher! 

Does he mold and master your life? 
Call Him Master! 

Does He shine upon the pathway that is dark to 
you? 

Call Him Guide! 

Does He reveal God to you? 
Call Him the Son of God! 

Does He reveal man? 

Call Him the Son of Man! 

Or, in following Him, are your lips silent in 
your incapacity to define Him and His influence 
upon you? 

Call Him by no name, but follow Him! 



APPENDIX 

There are three sayings of Jesus reported in the Gospels 
which CathoHc scholars regard as supporting the claim 
that Jesus gave to the apostles certain peculiar ecclesias- 
tical powers which they were authorized and enabled to 
transmit to their successors in office. These are (i) 
" Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my 
church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
it'' (Matt. i6: i8). (2) "I will give unto thee the keys 
of the Kingdom of Heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt 
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever 
thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven " 
(Matt. 16: 19 Compare Matt. 18: 18). (3) '* Jesus there- 
fore said unto them again, Peace be with you; as the 
Father has sent me even so send I you. And when he 
had said this he breathed on them and saith unto them, 
Receive ye the Holy Spirit: whosoever sins ye remit, 
they are remitted them; whosoever sins ye retain, they 
are retained.'' My interpretation of the first of these 
passages I have given in Chapter HI. i\Iy interpretation 
of the other two here given are condensed and in one 
respect modified from those given in my commentary on 
the New Testament: (1875-1876). 

I. And I will give unto thee the Keys of the Kingdom 
of Heaven. 
The key in the East was a symbol of authority, was 
made long, with a crook at one end, so that it could be 

191 



192 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

worn round the neck as a badge of office. To this use of 
the key reference is had in the phrase, " The government 
shall be upon his shoulder" (Isaiah 9:6) and in the 
promise to EHakim, " The key of the house of David I 
will lay upon his shoulder" (Isaiah 22:22), The phrase 
" kingdom of heaven " in the Gospels never means the 
visible, external, organic church, and rarely, if ever, the 
future state in contrast with the present, but the reign 
of God in the individual soul, or in the community. The 
" keys of the kingdom of heaven " do not, then, symbolize 
power to admit or exclude from the earthly church, or 
from heaven, but power in the life of allegiance to God, 
i. e. in the Christian life. The word bind is never used 
in the N. T. as a metaphor for condemnation, but is 
used metaphorically for binding the individual by laws, 
as in Rom. 7 : 2, I Cor. 7 : 27, 39 ; and the word loose is 
never used as a symbol for pardon or deliverance from 
sin, but always, either literally of unbinding or dissolving, 
as in Mark 1:7; 2 Pet. 3, 10, 11, 12, or metaphorically 
of the relaxing or dissolving of a law, as in Matt. 5: 19; 
John 5:18; 7:23; 10:35; I Cor. 7:27, The words 
*' bind " and " loose " had also this well established signi- 
ficance among the Jewish rabbis, being nearly equivalent 
to ''prohibit" and "permit." 

Two questions remain to be asked and answered : First, 
On whom is this gift bestowed? Certainly not on Peter 
and his successors in office, for neither here nor anywhere 
else in the N. T. is there any hint that he had either 
office or successors. In Matt. 18 : 18 it is conferred cer- 
tainly on all the twelve ; and since it is there coupled with 
instructions concerning forgiveness, and a promise con- 
cerning prayer, which are of universal application, it 
may safely be regarded as not confined to them, but be- 



APPENDIX 193 

stowed on all who possess a divinely inspired faith in 
Christ the Son of the living God. Second, Are there 
any parallel passages to this promise, as thus interpreted? 
Confessedly there are none which sustain the papal in- 
terpretation. The supposed power of the pope to admit 
to and shut out from heaven rest solely on this one 
verse, though John 20 : 23 is cited in support of his power 
to remit or retain sin. On the other hand, the right of 
the individual Christian to rely daily upon the personal 
help of a living Savior, and to be governed in his life, 
not by laws and rules and regulations, but by the in- 
dwelling Spirit of God, illuminating and inspiring his 
conscience, is abundantly confirmed by other passages of 
scripture. See for example John 8 : 32, 36 ; Rom. 7 : 6 ; 2 
Cor. 3:17; 5:7; Gal. 3:25; 4:7, 31; 5:1, 16, 18; Col. 
2 : 14-16, 20-22. 

I understand, then, the promise of the keys to be made 
to Peter as the possessor of a living faith in Jesus as the 
Divine Messiah, and through him to all who, by a like 
faith, are endued with a like strength of character, God- 
given, and I would paraphrase it thus: To my disciples 
I will give authority in their spiritual life, so that they 
shall no longer be bound by rules and regulations like 
those of the Pharisees or of the Mosaic code, but what- 
soever, under the inspiration of a living faith in me, they 
shall prohibit themselves, God will prohibit, and what- 
soever under that inspiration they shall permit themselves, 
God will permit: for they shall have the mind of the 
spirit. 

II. Whosoever sins you remit they are remitted unto 
them, etc. 
The word remit signifies primarily to get rid of. It is 



194 WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME 

not penalty but sin which the apostles are empowered 
to get rid of. See chapter VIII in this book. Compare 
Micah 7:19; Isaiah 44:22. Here therefore there is no 
hint of any authority in apostle or apostolic successor 
to declare sins forgiven or unforgiven in his discretion; 
there is the declaration that when the disciple of Christ 
is filled with the Christ spirit and sets himself in the 
spirit of his Master to cure men of their sins, his work 
shall not be in vain — the devil cast out shall not return 
to find the house swept and garnished so that he may take 
possession again. The second clause is more difficult of 
interpretation. Taken literally it would seem to imply 
power to fasten it upon the sinner as by a curse. But 
can this language be taken literally? It is capable of a 
merely negative interpretation. The meaning then would 
be, You have power to redeem men from their sins ; there- 
fore the responsibility is laid upon you. If you fail the 
sins will be retained. History confirms this interpretation. 
The Wesleyan movement, the Salvation Army, the temper- 
ance, anti-slavery, and other reforms, attest the truth 
that persons possessed of a Christ-like spirit of purity, 
courage, and self-sacrifice have a marvelous power to 
cast out evil from the individuals and from the commu- 
nity, though they may have no office in the church, while 
on the other hand, that power has never been possessed 
by the mere ecclesiastical ofiice holder, if he was not en- 
dowed with the Christ-like spirit. 



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